Girl Model

If you’ve ever volunteered or worked with children, you know that you usually have to do a CORI check and jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to prove that it is appropriate for you to work with children. The kids always have to be supervised by adults to make sure that they are safe. Apparently if you are a part of the modeling industry and work with underage girls, all those requirements vanish. The majority of Girl Model predominantly follows the thirteen-year old girls as they travel from Siberia to Japan. There are no interpreters. The girls speak Russian and very little English-no Japanese. Their cluelessness is our cluelessness, and the documentary only has brief moments of clarification from a fellow model, Rachel, who is 23, speaks English and explains how the girls end up in debt while the industry makes money off of them. Unfortunately the documentary spends very little time with Rachel. When not following the girls, focuses on either Ashley, the psychologically disturbed model scout (if she was a guy, I would assume that she is a serial killer instead of a possible survivor of abuse and should not be trusted around children) or Tigran, the head of the Russian modeling agency. He claims that he is helping the girls get out of poverty, but when he provides actual examples of how he helps to educate them and alludes to his own past life experience, he doth protest too much, methinks. If Girl Model had just followed the girls, then I would think that it effectively helped the viewers to relate to the teen models, but because it also tries to follow those within the industry, including some limp probing questions to the Japanese agency head which he easily deflected, I think that the makers of Girl Model tried to outline how the girls are unconscionably exploited, but failed at educating the viewer on the details of how that exploitation actually works. Unlike America’s Next Top Model, there are no contestants. Girl Model is the anti-America’s Next Top Model-just lambs to the slaughter. Not a must see unless you don’t mind being frustrated.
Side note: at least in US, any person under 18 can’t enter a contract, and that contract can’t be enforced. While the parents probably signed the modeling contract, they didn’t go to Japan with their children where the girls got into debt. Someone needs to flex their legal muscles for these girls because they can’t be in debt if they can’t contract.
Second side note & possible spoiler: I hated Ashley not because of her two degrees away from up skirt shots photography voyeurism or her creepy obsessions with baby dolls and dissecting them, but she complained about her luxurious house that she owns. NO ONE TOLD YOU TO BUY IT. If you don’t like it, why did you buy it? Just move. She did say that she sold it and will get another one, but she’ll probably complain about that one too. I’m not even playing the smallest violin for her.