Coming of Age in Sodom

Louis Malle has made two impressive films, The Fire Within and Lacombe, Lucien, and some valuable documentaries about India. But his problem seems to be a certain affectlessness: his films are less about feelings than about the need to have them. However charming, the joys of incest, as portrayed in The Murmur of the Heart, seem merely excogitated—Malle does not appear to be alive to their real implications; Lucien Lacombe’s moral anomie and lack of feeling are accepted a bit too casually; Alain, the hero of The Fire Within, kills himself a trifle too promptly when his youthful good times appear to be over.

Pretty Baby, Malle’s latest, is about Violet, a child prostitute in a brothel of Storyville, just before that famous New Orleans red-light district was closed down in 1917. Violet’s mother is Hattie, a girl in Nell’s bordello, who—when one of those accidents occurred, as they often did—allowed a child to be born to her. At first, Violet merely watches the life of the brothel with a mixture of curiosity and cold-bloodedness. Then she gets interested in Ernest Bellocq, a dedicated photographer who specializes in whorehouse scenes and particularly enjoys photographing Hattie. At 12, Violet is deemed to be of age, and is auctioned off in a kind of sex show cum slave sale to the highest bidder, a man who (as we hear but are not shown) roughly sodomizes her.

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John Simon

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Louis Malle has made two impressive films, The Fire Within and Lacombe, Lucien, and some valuable documentaries about India. But his problem seems to be a certain affectlessness: his films are less about feelings than about the need to have them. However charming, the joys of incest, as portrayed in The Murmur of the Heart, seem merely excogitated—Malle does not appear to be alive to their real implications; Lucien Lacombe’s moral anomie and lack of feeling are accepted a bit too casually; Alain, the hero of The Fire Within, kills himself a trifle too promptly when his youthful good times appear to be over.

Pretty Baby, Malle’s latest, is about Violet, a child prostitute in a brothel of Storyville, just before that famous New Orleans red-light district was closed down in 1917. Violet’s mother is Hattie, a girl in Nell’s bordello, who—when one of those accidents occurred, as they often did—allowed a child to be born to her. At first, Violet merely watches the life of the brothel with a mixture of curiosity and cold-bloodedness. Then she gets interested in Ernest Bellocq, a dedicated photographer who specializes in whorehouse scenes and particularly enjoys photographing Hattie. At 12, Violet is deemed to be of age, and is auctioned off in a kind of sex show cum slave sale to the highest bidder, a man who (as we hear but are not shown) roughly sodomizes her.