Review No.45: Girl Model

So it's documentary season here on Films of 2012 as I approach the first big milestone of 50 films and first up is a rather disturbing piece about young Russian models. Ashley Sabin and David Redmon's film starts with a creepy model casting call in Serbia in which young girls are paraded around in their underwear with the hope of being scouted. One such girl is 13 year old Nadya Val who lives in a very deprived Russian town where she shares a bed with her mother and so the promise of wealth through a modelling career is an opportunity she can't turn down. As we are told by model scout Ashley, herself a former model, it is the Japanese who love to photograph these models as they are obsessed with fresh young faces. As you can imagine a 13 year old in any big city would be lost but here Nadia is unable to communicate with those around her thankfully finding a friend in another Russian model who has travelled to the city. They both find it bleak and depressing while the paid jobs they are promised don't seem to materialise so they then try to eat lots of junk food in the hope of gaining weight to get out of their contracts. Running alongside this story is Ashley's tale of when she was a model with her career being similar to the girls as she felt exploited and lied to so she has now done the same to these girls. Nadia once again finds herself alone and she leaves Japan in debt as we are told at the end of the film she has since returned and then has gone on to other Asian countries to try and make some of the money she was promised so she can change her family's life for the better.

I feel the best documentaries are those in which the subjects are so fascinating that the film-makers don't have to intervene and that is the case with Girl Model. As I said at the start I found this completely shocking and disturbing at times so much so it moved me more than a lot of fictional films. Central to this is young Nadia a wide-eyed hopeful she is someone who you can invest a lot of your emotion in and someone who is visibly shaken by her new surroundings. Ashley is also an intriguing character somebody who has gone through this herself but has found the best money is to be made by scouting the girls but through old footage we see that she was severely exploited. She does tell us that a lot of these girls do end up selling their bodies as for a lot of them it is a natural progression and it at least makes them the money that they need. I think in some of the scenes that the cameramen could've intervened to help out the completely lost Nadia and this may well have happened once the cameras stopped rolling and in addition the problem with some documentaries is that some of the scenes do feel staged. At the end of the day though this opened me up to a world that I was not aware of while it was one that I may not have wanted to know about it was definitely an eye-opening experience that didn't outstay its welcome.

Verdict: A very well-made disturbing documentary with two compelling lead characters this gets a 7/10