|
       |
 |
 
Filmmaker Carol Cassidy and her all-woman crew traveled the U.S. to spend more than four months with beauty queens from varied cultural backgrounds asking, "What qualities do we honor and encourage when we crown a beauty queen?" In SMILE PRETTY, the girls tell stories of quiet courage, exuberant victories, fun, ambivalence and loss. Shot in cinema verité style, we see girls struggle to separate from their mothers and test their own limits. We watch them decide how far they're willing to go in pursuit of beauty. The intimate stories illuminate the questions all girls confront in adolescence: how can I be myself and also be accepted? How far will I go to conform to the cultural beauty ideal? Am I pretty? Do I need to change? What role will beauty play in my success in life? Girls competing in pageants work hard to live up to a specific ideal of contemporary feminine behavior and beauty. Not only do wardrobes and props add up to thousands of dollars, but, to become a beauty princess, the ordinary teenage girl must endure elaborate transformation rituals. These can involve human hair glued or sewn to the head, prosthetic breasts, body parts duct-taped into place, colored contact lenses, long plastic talons epoxied to the finger tips, layers of elaborate make-up, full cans of hair spray, 10 pound beaded gowns, 6 inch high heels. Not only are the girls taught to stand and to walk anew, they are expected to be always smiling, pleasing to others, quiet, polite and gentile. In SMILE PRETTY we witness the highs and lows of teenage beauty contestants. Some girls passionately embrace the beauty queen icon, stating that pageants give them a chance to travel, to learn confidence, to win money for college and to build their own identities. Monique, 15, Miss Shining Star says, "It can open a lot of doors for you and speed up your future. You'll no longer be - oh, that's just Monique Jones. You'll be -'That's Miss USA!'" Some interviews reveal the bittersweet quality of competing for beauty titles. Girls who spend an enormous amount of time and money creating the "perfect self" can be devastated when judges pass them over. Alison, age 13, relates the profound disappointment she felt in losing an important contest. "I don't know what I wanted to do, I just felt so bad. One judge killed me. It's like she just took a gun and went - BOOM! That's what they do. One judge can tear you up. They can tear you up."
SMILE PRETTY shows the many ways beauty queens are on the front lines of female identity and gender socialization battles. Twelve year-old Cheri Vedrine has been competing in pageants since she was four and has hundreds of shiny trophies to show for it. She saunters across the stage in full make-up and womanly regalia. Morgan Smith, having won the title Chitlin Princess, has photos taken with men who are strangers, who put their arms around her. As we watch girls manipulating their bodies - taping breasts, literally gluing their swimsuits on - we are reminded that the pursuit of beauty raises complex and difficult questions. Despite dreams of glamour and glitter, many of the girls are in fact quite realistic about the sacrifices involved in being a beauty queen. Says Monique Jones, "Someone didn't just drop me off here and I was a big winner. It took me a long time to get where I am today. It's taken a lot of time, a lot of practice, a lot of money to get here...There's always going to be somebody out there that is just as good as you or may even be better than you...I mean, when I walk into a pageant, I don't go 'Oh, I could beat her.' You never know, you never know." |
