THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE

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THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE
Some Kinda Girl

By Vera Brozzoni

This is a film about a woman: it is the story of Bettie Page, also known as “the queen of pin-ups”; it was written, directed (by Mary Harron) and produced by women.

Not that this is generally important, but this film exudes femininity: it tells so much about a woman’s new, groundbreaking way of living her physicality and spirituality.
Watching Bettie on screen, and how her psychology is depicted in such an extremely sensitive and nuanced way, it reminded me of Belle De Jour; the two women have completely different motivations, they could even be the two sides of the same coin (a subject for some long essay), but in terms of cinematic rendition they both remain sculpted in the audience’s memory as strong, atypical sexy women.

Now unfortunately I have to concentrate on Bettie alone.
Fact: Bettie Page starts modelling nude and kinky-dressed for photographers, and quickly she becomes an erotic icon. Behind the scenes: who is Bettie? What does she feel in posing nude and being responsible for thousands of American erections? Is she just a nice figure or does she have any brains? Strange to see, Bettie is kind-hearted but not stupid, on the contrary she has that wholesome common sense that prevents her from seeing anything wrong in what she does; but this has a counterpart, for her common sense easily overlaps with naivete, and Bettie finds herself unable to understand other people’s moral filth and pruderies. This is proved by the fact that, despite being abused by her short-term husband and later by a few young men, and despite being constantly seen as a sexual object, she strongly reacts to this filth and pulls herself together: as a result, she has no problem is showing her body and in having love relationships with men. She even cruises a guy when her longtime boyfriend Marvin leaves her (because her joke-S&M photographs are “disgusting” to him).

Bettie Page is actually the archetypical real hedonist, who enjoys and takes sheer pleasure from every experience. Even when she has religious qualms, a few seconds later she’s posing tied and gagged but still ironically wide-eyed. This is the most appealing, and yet uncanny, characteristic of Bettie’s posing: she smiles, she laughs, she jokes with the viewer and puts a lot of attention in her facial expressions and gestures, not on her breasts or anything that could be easily, banally erotic. More than a sexy tigresse, she gives the idea of a playful kitten; and yet she’s always perfectly conscious of what she’s doing, she’s no victim and loves her job. This was made easy by the honesty and respectfulness of her photographers, namely siblings Irving and Paula Klaw: in their studio, models breathe a friendly atmosphere; they shoot fetish and bondage film just the way they would shoot a cooking lesson.

Yet, she always remains a country girl who grew up in a very religious family in Nashville, Tennessee: her love for Jesus, that never grows dim as her career grows bright, is always sincere and deep; in fact she keeps repeating that “Adam and Eve were naked in the garden of Eden; when they wanted to sin, they put clothes on”. Are sex and religion a contradiction in Bettie’s nature? Not at all: she just separated the secular world from the spiritual one – a hard task many men cannot bear. That’s when her problems begin: Bettie’s posing is fine with God, but not with men.And it’s only their fault if she starts feeling funny about her job: the first one who plants a seed in her head is the photographer John Willie, who is curious about her personality and contradictions, and questions her about her religious beliefs between a bondage shot and the other. And then there’s common people’s opinion: pornography, as a priest says during the famous anti-porn trial in 1955 that will put an end to Irving and Paula Klaw’s business, “is more dangerous a peril than communism”.

Effectively, director Mary Harron captures with subtlety how dreadful were the ’40s and ’50s, sexually and socially speaking: common men are presented like rapists or hopelessly clumsy, women are repressed and ignorant; the exceptions of course are the models and some of the photographers that orbit around Bettie: they are more honest than the “honest people” that condemn them all. In fact, the court scenes are bathed in an oppressive atmosphere that doesn’t even allow the camera to move; whereas the photographic studios, despite whips and gags, always bring a sense of freshness and lightness, and the camera moves fluidly around the models’ bodies. As the film clearly suggests, the secret in Bettie’s personality lies in her being totally non-judgemental and objective about people’s desires: what’s wrong if seeing a girl spanking another girl “makes them happy”? Nothing. That’s what the ’50s cannot accept.

By the way: the ’50s. In order to recreate the right feeling of that time, director Mary Harron has chosen to alternate previously existing library images with her original footage, and to make the two look as similar as possible. For this purpose she actually used old-style film stocks, lighting and styling, be it a rich black and white that recalls noir films, or hyper-saturated colour like in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas (remember Far From Heaven by Todd Haynes), or even Super8 amateur films; this happened under the supervision of cinematographer Mott Hupfel. Realism is enhanced by showing photos and film of the real Bettie Page, and showing the supposed “making of” them; it is important to notice how this formal perfection is not void of sense, whereas it increases the audience’s empathy with the characters. If the visual side is perfect, the editing does not run smoothly as it should, especially in the last part of the film, when the change of perspective in Bettie’s life needs a change in pace; the final scene comes a bit in a hurry, but it’s not a serious damage to the film. An intelligent selection of songs of the time, all sung by women, accompanies the protagonist’s trip into the world.

Apart from the many good formal qualities of this film and the passion Harron has infused it, large part of the merit goes to Gretchen Mol (in the title role) who acts very close to her character. She seems to have Bettie’s same spontaneity and nonchalance - her real seduction weapons; thanks to an extremely expressive face and an amazing physique du role, Mol builds up her character as nice, positive, solar. The rest of the actors is also very well cast: from James Bauer’s Irving Klaw to Lili Taylor’s Paula Klaw, to scathing David Strathairn (the star of Good Night, And Good Luck) in the cameo of judge Kefauver.