Notorious Bettie Page, The


Rating = B-

This movie is strangely without feeling, which may have paralleled the real character of Bettie Page. She bopped along, apparently brushing off sexual violence to her as a young woman, and apparently without very deep feelings about posing in (for the time) scanty clothes or nude or in what today we would define as demeaning poses but which she apparently took as just sort of a game with which she supported herself. That she was used by the photographers who staged her photographs, and the pretend photographers which used their cameras as an excuse to gawk at her, seems clear. Her near irrelevance to everything she participated in is best (and poignantly) illustrated in the scene where she stands by to be called to testify in a Senate hearing on the evils of her genre of photography and waits 12 hours while all other interested parties speak and she is eventually dismissed and told the Senators don't need to hear from her. The photography of the film is very stylized, sometimes looking like a movie from the period and sometimes looking like 8mm home movies.

[2006-06-05]