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L'enfance nue and the saturnine aesthete, Minnelli's Gigi and Huston's Moulin Rouge figure in the framework. New Orleans, Degas and Seurat and Vuillard views, the Storyville red-light district circa 1917. "I run a good, old-fashioned whorehouse, monsieur." At once elegant and sordid, the place is something of a wonderland to the nymphet (Brooke Shields) who knows no other normalcy. Her mother (Susan Sarandon) yearns to be respectueuse, as Sartre would say, a colleague pricks her dream: "It's those respectable people who are lying on top of you every night." Ceremoniously auctioned off to be deflowered, the child treats the aftermath prankishly, her smeared expression somewhere between giggle and wince. Enter the reserved photographer (Keith Carradine), diffidently documenting the milieu to the irritation of the wizened madam (Frances Faye): "I don't cater to the inverts." Taboo subject matter, unruffled gaze, a signature Louis Malle approach for his first analysis of Americana. The New World innocent and decadent, where a prepubescent courtesan learns ribald endearments but gets spanked for flirting with a Black boy. Hotheads and politicians and assorted moneybags, a clientele expanded on the verge of the Great War. "Since the naval base came, we're busy all year round now." Crossroads of ragtime and jazz, slyly observed by the Jelly Roll Morton stand-in (Antonio Fargas). The bride plays with dolls and rides the pony, the groom fusses over the minutiae of his apparatus, a déjeuner sur l'herbe follows the wedding. To be rescued is to be dutifully taught shame, the coda freezes the young heroine in the proper uniform, cf. Buñuel's The Young One. "Gives me queasy innards to see a thing like that." Hou takes a note (Flowers of Shanghai). Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. With Diana Scarwid, Barbara Steele, Seret Scott, Gerrit Graham, Mae Mercer, Don Hood, and Matthew Anton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |