People just love Bettie Page. They loved her in the 1950s, when she was just a nice, wholesome Nashville girl being photographed for naughty men's magazines, and they love her even more now as the most revered pin-up model of all time.
Director Mary Harron clearly loves her lots, and has chosen not to concentrate much on the darker periods in Bettie's life; this is not a warts-and-all rollercoaster. Bettie was raised in a religious family, stumbled into modelling in the 1950s, then went back to God. And that's pretty much the size of it, as far as this film is concerned.
The early section does show her getting beaten up by a few boys, and raped, then attempts to squeeze some drama out of a Senate investigation into pornography, with Bettie's bondage shots causing upset among moral crusaders, but even then she's stuck sitting outside the courtroom. And the film chooses to ignore her latter years, during which she allegedly became rather violent and spent some time in a mental institution.
This is all fair enough, but what we're left with is little more than a visual timeline of her career, an hour-and-a-half of people taking photographs of her. This is even more of a disappointment when you consider that the previous film by this writer-director team (Harron and Guinevere Turner) was American Psycho, although Harron admits she didn't want to delve too much into the dramatic aspects of Bettie's life, or probe any deep psychological issues.
And this is certainly a loving portrait; Gretchen Mol is outstanding as Bettie, playing her as an adorable girl who seems to find this modelling lark absolutely ridiculous and just has a lot of fun with it. There's a lot of affection for her, the photography, and the era, and it looks gorgeous, but that's as much as you're going to get out of it.
OUT 4 AUGUST
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