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Bettie Page Reveals All

Runs Fri., Jan. 3-Thurs., Jan. 9 at SIFF Film Center. Not Rated. 101 minutes.

This new documentary contains many disclosures, some of them strange, some terribly sad. But one of the weirdest is surely the description of a “camera club” in New York in the late 1940s and early ’50s, shutterbugs who trooped out of town every weekend with a handful of models to take pin-up photos. Such pictures, their subjects partially clad or entirely barenekkid, might be sold by mail-order or to magazines like Wink, or Cavalier—you know, for discriminating readers. Some of these (apparently docile) smut-purveyors are still around; interviewed for this documentary, they suggest the kinds of bottom-feeding oddballs from Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, but without the florid personalities. The mind boggles at the thought of these blandly organized jaunts and the mixture of tawdriness and innocence they conjure up. (Such scenes were suitably odd in the 2005 biopic The Notorious Bettie Page, which starred Gretchen Mol.)

At the center of many of those photographs was Bettie Page (1923-2008), an unusually expressive model who was reasonably well-known on the underground nudie circuit in the ’50s and then became a major cult icon by the ’80s. This is her story; and thankfully director Mark Mori uses audiotape of Page recalling her life to string together the movie’s narrative (and its ample full-frontal photos and film clips). We hear from a few others—the photographers, one of Page’s ex-husbands, and the inevitable Hugh Hefner—but the best of the film is Page’s own matter-of-fact voice, huskily spinning her tale.

The general aura that surrounds Page’s resurgent popularity emphasizes the campy, cheerful, sex-positive nature of her image, but her story isn’t a happy one. Molested as a child by her father and sexually assaulted as an adult, Page soldiered on through bad marriages and a few life-threatening incidents. She found God and quit the pin-up business in the ’50s, spiraling into mental instability in middle age. Page says she enjoyed posing for pictures, even the bondage and spanking films made by the notorious Irving Klaw (a perfectly nice and mild fellow, according to Page).

Yet, as full of voyeuristic hot air the film’s commentators may be, it is true that Page’s spark leaps out of her photographs—she’s visibly thriving under the validation and reward she appears to be getting from the camera. (So many good actors have that same hunger to be looked at.) You can’t help wondering where that need came from, which is the troubling bass line beneath the film. However much her admirers coo about the delight or empowerment they see in those vintage pix, and however much we might appreciate the adults-only arrow aimed at the heart of the Eisenhower-era facade of respectability, the overall takeaway from Bettie Page Reveals All is sadness—and a lingering unease about the appetite that needs to feed on the flesh of ambivalent icons. Robert Horton

PA Touch of Sin

Runs Fri., Jan. 3-Thurs., Jan. 9 at Northwest Film Forum. Not Rated.

125 minutes.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty isn’t the only picture peddling fantasy right now, but Jia Zhangke’s vision is considerably darker than that of Ben Stiller. In the misfire that is Mitty, a virtuous, underappreciated schlub dreams of grandeur—then is vindicated in real life, too (see: cake, eating, having, extra frosting, etc.). Jia offers four unhappier linked scenarios here, based on real news events, following an embittered coal miner, a rootless criminal, a lovelorn receptionist, and a teenage factory worker drifting from job to job. All are from villages being obliterated by new factories, railways, airports, and roads. Most are nomadic, finding jobs where they can and wiring money back home to elderly parents or neglected wives and kids. They’re cogs in the machinery of China’s relentless modernization, so is it any wonder they dream?

A short prologue leaves three dead and ends with a fiery explosion—more like a Western action movie than Jia’s prior realism (The World, Still Life, 24 City). Later in the film, bus passengers will watch such a violent Hollywood flick; these are the scenes, Jia suggests, that are displacing the old peasant songs, national mythology, and Chinese opera. Their imaginations are being systematically Ben Stillerized.

Certainly the pissed-off coal miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) has seen a few revenge movies. He’s a local dissident trying to send a protest letter to Beijing about how the village bigwig sold off the mine and pocketed the proceeds. Now Dahai’s childhood friend is a rich industrialist, flying home from a Hong Kong shopping spree on a jet and driving a Maserati. (These images also seem fed by our Western tabloids and bling.) “There’s no justice!,” says the indignant yet powerless Dahai, who then shifts from Lomanesque pathos to Bronsonesque retribution.

Also overmatched by a corrupt, inhumane system are the robber (Wang Baoqiang), the country girl (Zhou Tao, Jia’s wife) having an affair with a married man, and the factory teen (Luo Lanshan). The presence of iPhones and iPads gives them all a sense of connectedness not just to China’s rich, coastal elite but to the broader world of Bieber and Beyonce. A short generation before, their parents had no such awareness; nor was there such yawning social inequality to be aware of. Ironies abound: The teenager works as a lackey at a brothel called The Golden Age; and he later visits a sprawling factory town named Oasis of Prosperity (run by a Fortune 500 company, his Taiwanese boss proudly tells him). The state and its moneyed apparatchiks are no less enamored of fantasy, as when the brothel girls do a marching song for their clients while dressed in skimpier versions of the old Communist Youth uniforms. In this creepy, funny scene, traditions have just become another sexual fetish—like naughty nurses, nuns, or maids. The new economy gets to fuck the old social order.

“Shooting guns isn’t boring,” says the robber in his Chicago Bulls cap. What’s boring, to him at least, is the old village—where he reluctantly, infrequently returns. Not everyone in the film is so violent as he, but there’s a shared, stewing resentment that inevitably boils over. How many overworked, underpaid, and humiliated Americans haven’t dreamed of killing their bosses? After Columbine and so many other shooting sprees, those fantasies are taboo here; but in Jia’s vision of modern China, there aren’t enough bullets to go around. Brian Miller

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