> REVIEW
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Girl Model (2011)
Confessions of a model scout…
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By Helen Adkins | February 2012
DIRECTOR(s): David Redmon/Ashley Sabin
David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s absorbing documentary looks into the shady world of modelling beyond New York, Paris, London and Milan to Siberia, where pre-pubescent teens are lured to Japan with the promise of wealth and fame.
Our guide is Ashley Arbaugh, a former US model now turned model scout who travels between Siberia, Japan and the States as a supplier of very young girls for the Japanese fashion market.
The film opens in a vast Siberian hall, where stick-thin girls aged between 12 and 16 shiver in bikinis under the critical eye of Arbaugh and Russian model agent Tigran. Arbaugh is there to source precisely what the Japanese fashion market wants – Western looks wrapped up in a pre-pubescent body. And they like them young, states Arbaugh with a smile and raised eyebrows. ‘Very young’.
Nadya fits the bill – a doe-eyed thirteen year old who dreams of pulling her family out of grinding poverty. She is flown to Tokyo, but despite Tigran’s fervent protestations that he wants to ‘save’ these girls from a life in Siberia, Nadya arrives at Tokyo airport with no one to meet her, no English and no money.
Nadya spends the next few miserable weeks going from one failed casting to another, roaming the streets, borrowing money for food and weeping into the phone to her mother as her dream dissolves into harsh reality.
Throughout this disturbing tale, Arbaugh pontificates on her own experience as a Japanese model and muses on the state of the industry today. Her presence in the film is initially perplexing. She apparently approached Redmon and Sabin with her story, presumably to lift the lid on the racket she’s involved in.
And the story she has highlighted is indeed deeply shocking and tragic. But although Arbaugh twists and turns in her condemnation of what she herself does for a living and mutters darkly about prostitution and sexual abuse, she is also unable to resist showing off the spoils of her work, a huge modernist house (with pool) in LA. She never quite tells it how it is, and can never quite make the decision to stop participating in what she sees.
The result is she ends up mirroring the moral ambivalence and hypocrisy of the world she apparently wishes to expose and as we are shown around her affluent yet strangely clinical LA home, it’s the frozen wastes of Siberia that seem warmer and more joyous as Nadya is tearfully welcomed back into the bosom of her family.
Subject……………………………………………………………………………..……………..
Girl Model looks at a fascinating and largely unknown aspect of the International
modelling world that exposes the cold realities behind the catwalks and flashing
lights. 3
Direction………………………………………………………………………………..…………
Redmon and Sabin have handled this complex and unnerving story in a subtle,
yet deeply thought-provoking manner. 4
Verdict………………………………………………………………………………………………
Thoughtfully and carefully crafted, Girl Model gets under the skin of the modelling
industry to produce a disturbing yet fascinating film. 4
