Louis Malle
Pretty Baby

"Pretty Baby", Louis Malle's Hollywood debut, destined to cause more scandal than his previous works, begins with a first part in which depicts what was a typical brothel in the red-light district of New Orleans during the period that preceded its illegalization (1917). The second part is more interesting, where the director begins to work on the audience by staging a "The Price is Right" for the virginity of the twelve-year-old Brooke Shields, presented like a dish around a table of more or less illustrious characters; yet, despite captivating the screen, she turns out to be a disappointment in her acting performance.

Among the looks of mixed anger and compassion from the black jazz pianist; the disillusioned eyes of the madam who ends up burning the much-coveted banknotes; the frivolity and volatility of the spats among the prostitutes - the intent to introduce the hot topic of child prostitution into the cerebral mechanisms to be processed as "normal", only to then contradict itself by representing snippets of married life between the prepubescent protagonist and the photography-loving Hubert Hubert in a playful yet very unbelievable manner, lingering meanwhile with various shots on Brooke's bare nudity (which, truth be told, I didn't expect) continuously playing on the contradiction between the prostitute and the child until the conflict settles in favor of the "child", fails, and one never truly encounters something indispensable.

The only scene that somewhat moves beyond the inertia of the film is the group excursion between the prostitutes and the photographer, following the latter's marriage to the protagonist, with its fair share of tragicomic mishaps. It's worth noting Louis Malle's touch, who manages to bluff by foreshadowing tragic occurrences with very little.
In conclusion, I would say the film is a failure from the perspective of shocking audiences, given that the theme is quite unoriginal; nonetheless, the set design is good; fascinating performance by Susan Sarandon, who is evidently not as unattractive as I thought; a stunning Brooke Shields, but unable to act at high levels - all contributing to a boring film which, as exemplified by one of the critics in perspective (2003), "once could have been shocking and banal; today it is only banal".
That said, I find it terrible that today this film (in its DVD version) has been censored by several minutes and some scenes modified to reduce the area of nudity of the protagonist, given that in any case it's not pedo-pornography, but rather an evocation of a sad period in American history. In such a case, it would have been better to withdraw it from the market, since from a cinematic point of view it doesn't offer much: it's better than censoring left and right.