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Created Jul 01, 2013 11:35AM PST • Edited Jul 27, 2019 07:18PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Like most industries, the modeling industry has a supply chain. Girl Model documents one tawdry strand, originating in the tiny villages of Siberia and ending in the glitzy salons of Japan.

   It’s not a pretty picture. It is full of pretty girls, many shockingly young. The Japanese like pubescent models for their advertising images, so Western scouts and Russian agencies procure such children from Siberia, where blue-eyed beauties seemingly grow on trees, desperate to help their impoverished families.

   Irony abounds throughout this revealing documentary. For one, a tiny slip of a girl wears a pink shirt declaring “Femininity, Be Proud,” even as she’s being exploited for her femininity. For another, a former model’s body bizarrely betrays her, juxtaposing the beauty and beastliness that occupy a single being.

   There’s lots of money to be made, of course. A former model who’s now a scout occasionally repairs to her multimillion dollar Connecticut house like it’s a Fortress of Solitude. She and the older models know what they’re doing is wrong, given that the new girls are mere children. Thus they all spout self-justifying rationales, most of it insipid.

   The documentary focuses on one aspiring girl model, a 12 year old blonde named Nadya. When her and her family’s payday-dreams fail to come true, Girl Model becomes a veritable Hoop Dreams in heels.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   A jaded scout and a fledgling model are the twin focuses of the documentary.

   Nadya Vall is a country girl who shares a bed with her grandmother before getting sent to Japan as a model. Not even 13, she’s barely pubescent, leggy, with a young woman’s hips, but no other womanly features. Yet she towers over the Japanese, especially when tottering around in high heels. At one point, she says she was a brown mouse before leaving her village, only to return to her beloved pet mouse at movie’s end. While her parents and agent may not consider that a happy ending, clear-eyed viewers will.

   Ashley Arbaugh is the scout, a former model who has extended her career by procuring new girls from the hinterlands and proffering them to advertisers in the Gothams of Japan. She’s not pimping them, but not far from that either. Still, the movie was her idea, for which she deserves considerable credit.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Very Good 3.5

    Filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin have crafted a compelling and fascinating documentary, full of wit. To wit, an older model complains about girl models taking her place, just as a new girl arrives at the car she’s sitting in and asks her to move over. IOW, she gets literally displaced by a girl model.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.4

    No sex or even nudity, though the models parade around in bikinis and heels. Nor are they shown to be sexually exploited, though it’s darkly hinted that that is not unknown.

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Salty 1.6

21. Reality

    Natural 1.0

    Someone in Girl Model says “the modeling business is corrupt.” Indeed. The movie shows humans feeding an industry that is based on other humans getting reduced to objectified images of themselves.

    It’s not just the scouts and agencies that bear blame. The models and their families also must share in it. Indeed the models – girls and women – have ridiculous expectations. While the poor Siberians are deeply sympathetic, are they much different than aspiring models in New York, Paris or Milan?

22. Circumstantial Natural 1.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0