Girl Model

"blaming beautiful women for their own troubles is our default position. It makes us feel better about our own flawed bodies to be snarky and assume they just need to eat a sandwich, or decide that teen models, like child pageant stars, are all some freakish manifestation of bad mothering and too much reality television. Girl Model is a stark reminder of our own complicity in the global phenomenon of modeling. After all, girls like Nadya wouldn't be for sale if we stopped buying."

[Chris Elliot - "Get a Life"]
"Look at this face, what do you see?
Look at it Dad, what do you see?
What do you see? Say it, say it!"
'Uhh ayuahh it's a face!'
"Yeah but what kind of face?"
'Uhh, pale.. pasty.. psychotic'
"No Dad!
It's a neatly chiseled, well groomed, drop dead handsome face!" 
Oh my God, they're gorgeous!

The girl at the center of “Girl Model” is 13-year-old Nadya Vall, a willowy candidate whose childlike looks make her a shoo-in for the youth-obsessed Japanese market and whose consequent travails are chronicled by Sabin and Redmon, from Siberia to Tokyo and a series of misadventures that seem built into the system. But where Vall is the picture of innocence and aspiration, ex-model Ashley Arbaugh is something else. The film’s most intriguing and enigmatic character, Arbaugh now wrangles young girls for the Russian agency run by a shady customer named Tigran, and his Japanese counterpart, known as “Messiah” (a mogul who “really likes models,” as Arbaugh says, in the film’s most loaded moment).

Scout Ashley exhibits nothing short of full on Stockholm Syndrome as she openly admits that the fashion industry is based on “nothing.” She looks at the camera with dull eyes as she shares her own bouts of depression when she was a young teenager floating in the Japanese market. Her forced smiles and shifty gazes punctuate stories of young models turned prostitutes as she is forthcoming about the conditions she inducts these young girls into. Her boss, the head of Switch Models, is in 40s and when she tells the camera that he likes young girls — the moment is ambiguously uncomfortable. Cut to the same man showing  Ashley photos on his laptop of a rising star in his agency — a 12-year-old girl in thigh-high stockings and high heels photographed in black and white. She nods and smiles at the photographs approvingly.

Her emotional disconnection from her job, her “trained eye” for youth, and her work with “the girls” squares oddly with her pronounced want of a child — a desire that is revisited  as she mocks a couple of baby dolls she purchased when she bought her Connecticut home. Later in the film, Ashley has to have both a cyst and a thyroid removed, a tactful inclusion on the part of the filmmakers as in the context of the film and her continued justification for her seedy job, she appears to be rotting from the inside out.

Tigran Khachatrian, explains what he thinks is special about 12- and 13-year-old girls: they have "dignity,"

Well actually it was a Ukrainian guy named Alex that she wanted us to meet, but he told us to get the heck out, and so then Ashley took us to meet Tigran.... For some  - reason and you’d have to ask her – her clothing was never finished, there was no indication that she was having a show during Fashion Week, and when we got to Paris, we discovered she wanted us to meet a guy named Tigran....There is no relationship with Tigran, we know him through Ashley (Arbaugh) and the first time they met she told us to leave and we were baffled and disappointed. We returned and he was eager to speak with us. We were confused what Ashley told him, but he agreed to let us film him anyway.... We still don’t know what she told Tigran, who he is, or why she wanted us to film him.

"Once you watch the footage it is VERY clear that this is Russian mob, and possibly, Japanese Yakuza perpetrating a scam. The girls and their families end up in debt and the agency even makes money off of photos the girls never get paid for and they are using an American woman (Ashley) as the recruiter to make their outfit look legitimate." @Bianca Juganaru

"The whole thing is just so sketchy since the agency (and the recruiter) seem to be making tons of money, plus they are paying all the living and travel expenses of these girls, and Nadya, herself, was sent to Asia after two months of making nothing. We asked ourselves, "what agency does this?" The answer is too simple. The girls are picked very young for a Japanese/Asian market....we figured that they must be putting hidden cameras in the girls' living quarters and bathrooms for live streaming web porn. Ugly, we know, but it seems to be the only fitting explanation of the constant recruitment of young girls and the seemingly endless supply of money these agencies are making and spending to facilitate the operation. Why didn't the documentarians figure this out?!" susanemacaluso@yahoo.com

"These young girls are sought out in the poorest & most isolated parts of the world, and will have no chance against Ashley’s experience & smile, along with the industry machinery behind her. Tigran is too successful & too old for the train rides now, but he has fond memories of the back-and-forth motion, the young girls, and the toilet room."