Girl Model

The soullessness of Ashley, the main character, is a little horrifying. It's clear that she believes the girls are being exploited as she was in their shoes, but she's made a reluctant peace with it now that it's bought her a house and drags new innocents into her pit of despair. Messiah runs Switch, an agency that apparently never pays the girls he profits from and charges them in the process. The subtext is this leads girls to prostitution to actually get paid.

If you're looking for a scathing exposé of the Japanese modelling industry, this isn't it. Although the filmmakers' intentions were to simply "document" the experiences of the 13-year-old Russian model Nadya, that simply isn't the case because there is no neutral vantage point in the narrative. The sterility of this approach is that of indecisiveness. David Redmon failed pathetically when trying to question Messiah about his exploitative agency. Pseudo-objectivity is the bane of documentaries.

Amateurish documentary about the slavery conducted by fashion companies in Asia.

I want to slap these people. Especially Ashley.

This is how you make a vampire film. Fucking dark.

Not nearly good enough to justify not being an actual documentary. Why not just make an actual documentary? Apparently it's supposed to be an actual documentary but I don't buy it. And if you're wondering, the *cinematography* is not as good as one would hope.

Vérité Documentaries are rare nowadays. They're very hard to pull off. They rely completely on the subject and the editing to do all the heavy lifting. Sadly, 'Girl Model' is an example of what can happen when it's mishandled. The main characters in this film don't do enough to drive the narrative forward. Ashley is an attention-seeking lout who rambles incessantly and Nadya is still uncomfortable in her own skin. Thus, the doc is stagnant. The fragments are there, but left without focus.

a disturbing film