Pretty Babies explores the gap between the cinematic worlds we grow up dreaming inside and the reality that exists outside them, and it pursues that idea with the kind of raw, unguarded conviction that only a debut can sustain.
Marie and Luna are eighteen, best friends, and certain that Hollywood is waiting for them. Marie, played by Emily Alyn Lind in a performance of real delicacy, has been raised on a diet of old black-and-white films — the only ones her religious mother permits — and has constructed an interior life from their glamour and romance. Luna, played by Sadie Stanley with an extrovert’s confidence that gradually reveals itself as something more desperate, is the one who decides they should actually go. The two leave their small Texas town in the way people do when they’re still young enough to believe that leaving is the hard part.
What they find, of course, is that the road to Hollywood runs through a world of run-down motels, predatory men and a particular kind of female solidarity that carries its own complications. Gemma and Sapphire — Madelaine Petsch and Ashley Benson, both doing more with their roles than the material strictly requires — are sex workers who convince the girls that a calculated detour through that world is simply what it takes. Luna, driven by ambition, accepts this far more readily than Marie, and the film’s central tension lives in the widening gulf between them: one willing to sacrifice anything for the dream, the other slowly realising she’s already sacrificed too much.
Tyler-Marie Evans shoots the film with an eye that clearly loves what cinema can do with light and longing. The interspersed fragments of old Hollywood footage, the handheld footage from Marie’s camcorder, and the soft, dreamlike passages where the film briefly lets its characters believe in something better — these moments have a genuine ache to them. There is a scene where Marie, briefly romanced by a boy she meets on the road, exists inside something close to happiness, and Evans films it with enough tenderness that you feel the loss before it’s even arrived.
Where the film divides viewers is in how it handles the darker material. Evans is clearly more interested in the emotional reality of her characters than in the mechanics of the world they’ve entered, and the restraint she brings to the sex work sequences has read to some as evasion and to others as respect. The accusation that the film doesn’t always maintain the female gaze it seems to promise is not without foundation, and a late-film moment involving coercion between the two friends sits uneasily, both in narrative terms and in how it’s framed.
But Evans’ underlying intention — to see these young women clearly, beyond the identities the world assigns them — comes through with enough consistency to make Pretty Babies worth reckoning with. It’s a film that wants, above everything else, to insist on the full humanity of girls the world has already begun to reduce to something simpler. That it doesn’t always manage it cleanly is partly a function of a first feature still finding its own edges; but the way it keeps trying, with this much feeling, is admirable.
Grab tickets to Pretty Babies at EIFF here.
