Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Foster embodies that intriguing juxtaposition just as charismatically in Bugsy Malone , yet there is a reverse dynamic at play; in Alan Parker’s bizarro-world parody of 1920s gangster films, all roles are played by child actors (their tommy guns shoot cream-pie “bullets”), running around in 1920s adult costumes and talking like Jimmy Cagney and Jean Harlow. 12Foster plays Tallulah, the shimmery, smoky-eyed, speakeasy chanteuse; she is a little girl meant to “pass” as an adult woman, her youth is meant to be entirely obscured rather than exploited, and yet that is still the wink-wink conceit of the film: Look at this child in the dress of a grown-up gangster moll! I am as fascinated by Tallulah as I was by Iris, and there is no creepy Keitel-threat to discomfit me here, no too-graphic sexualizing of Foster’s youthful beauty — but she is still suggestively erotic in a way that enthralls me. In her big number, Tallulah slinks around the club in her satin gown, singing oh-so-knowingly and world-wise:

TALLULAH

Lonely. . you don’t have to be lonely. .

Come and see Tallulah

We can chase your troubles away. .

When they talk about Tallulah,

you know what they say:

No one south of heaven’s

gonna treat you finer.

Tallulah had her training

in North Carolina. . 13

She drains a cocktail, she perches on a table and strokes her fingers down male patrons’ faces and slides hankies from their breast pockets, and all the “men” present (who seem all the more boyish in contrast to Foster’s innate maturity) are clearly in thrall to her, too. She is the crème de la crème of the speakeasy, the leading lady and star of the show, of this whole movie, for me. I am just as beguiled by Sandy and Iris and Tallulah as all those men are, but I want to be these child-women. I want what they have; I want to capture and channel and emulate their satiny female mastery of the world. I am beginning to understand, I think, being famous for sex —and, thanks to these cinematic Lolitas, I have determined that power lies in being an innocent little girl with the empowered sexual assurance of a grown woman.

Thank Heaven. . for little girls!

Those little eyes, so helpless and appealing. .!

— Maurice Chevalier in Gigi 14

It is later in that same Iris-and-Tallulah year, I am still twelve years old, and I am sitting on the toilet, peeing, my white cotton panties at my feet. There’s a party downstairs — family, friends, very festive — here in my grandparents’ house, and I’ve chosen the upstairs master bathroom to considerately leave the downstairs one for guests. And because it is secluded, I haven’t bothered to lock the door. There is a knock, but not much of one — enough that I stop peeing, startled — and the door immediately opens, and my cousin Morris is standing there. He is a cousin by marriage, some lineage through my grandmother’s many siblings I can never keep straight; he is fiftyish, a leisure suit, a graying pompadour. He puts on a show of startled—“Oh, sorry, didn’t know you were up here, honey . .”—but then lounges in the doorway, studying me, an appreciative smile on his face, while I mumble something like “Oh, that’s all right.” I even apologize, perhaps, for being there. I am frozen, I am sitting on the toilet, staring at my white cotton panties at my feet. I have never liked this cousin Morris — too huggy, too kissy, too much honey —and I am unsure what to do; he is not the candy-offering, trench-coated stranger in the dark alley I have been warned about, he is doing nothing wrong, really, not advancing on me, nothing like Teddy’s initial grab-and-kiss assault on Sandy, nothing more wrong than the rudeness at walking in on someone in the bathroom and not immediately retreating. As one should. I can’t call for “help”—help for what? What can happen? He is just standing there in the doorway, smiling and studying me. He is a cousin, he is male, he is the adult, the adult male. He finally leaves after a frozen forever, and I pull up my panties, I flush, I wash my hands and count to ten and hurry downstairs, where I hug the wall at the opposite side of the room for the rest of the evening, and tell no one, because: tell what ? It is a minor incident, a nothing happened; it is a ridiculously trivial thing to remember, after all these years.

But I do remember: My thin naked thighs and the humiliating white glow of my panties and my urine turning green the blue water of the toilet bowl and the ice-clinking party sounds of far-away downstairs, and wanting it to be a nothing thing that isn’t happening, here. He is very large, standing in the doorway, and I want to think there is nothing to fear, because, after all, I am in control; I have lured a grown adult man into pursuit of me, away from a party, up a flight of stairs, into standing in a bathroom doorway gazing upon a young girl in an intimate moment. I have driven behavior — see how alluring I am, how powerful?

But I don’t feel powerful; there is no glory in this. The assurance of the moment is not mine, I have no mastery, I am no Beatrice, no precious muse to inspire poetry, or great art, or love. I am a toilet honey , a dirty underwear girl, a crushable cockroach child. This adult man’s. . interest? temptation? depraved appetite? is no comment on me, of course — I am in no way responsible, I’m only a little girl.

But in that moment I can’t know that. I’m only a little girl.

“The finest delicacy New Orleans has to offer!” is Violet, thevirgin girl-child being auctioned off in a 1917 whorehouse in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby . 15And good lord, is she delicious, beyond merely pretty, beyond jaw-droppingly beautiful; twelve-year-old Brooke Shields is simply the most exquisite human being I have ever seen. The film begins and ends with a lingering shot of Violet’s face, meant to bookend and illustrate the character’s emotional arc, and while the young actress can’t quite pull off the shifting nuances of Violet’s inner life, that face is mesmerizing. It is a woman’s face, with its thick eyebrows and cleft chin and photogenic bone structure (young Elizabeth Taylor rocked her child face the same way), but it is the combination of that seemingly mature façade with the vacuous inscrutability of Shields’s expression that both disturbs and delights: This child (Violet or Brooke?) is still a blank slate, we can project and imprint anything onto her we might like, and that is exactly what the men attending this whorehouse auction — and we, the audience, as witnesses to it — are being invited to do. The inner-life of this child (Violet or Brooke?) is irrelevant; it is the experience she can create for us that raises her price, commands our interest .

And Violet has been well trained to do this, by the brothel girls who coach her on how to play her role (whimper and cry, then act as if it feels good) and especially by her mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon), who uses her still-virgin daughter as a lure to arouse her own customers, “inviting” her into the bedroom to stand and watch. Keith Carradine enters the story as Bellocq, a photographer hoping to capture on film the madonna/whore quality Sarandon so gorgeously exemplifies — and he is so fascinated by — and his gentle attentions to her mother inspire a jealous Violet to try out her skills of seduction; initially, her childish flirtations come off as mere brattiness. But by her big Auction Night — where she is brought in to customers, displayed on a platter like a roast pig — she has become a pro; handed over to the stone-faced man who has paid a small fortune for her, she knows exactly how to deliver her lines: