Nadya is one of two Russian girls the film tracks – the second, Madlen, ends up as her only companion in Japan (because she can speak good enough English, and has a mobile, she’s also her main support). His Japanese counterpart is nicknamed “Messiah”. The Russian intermediary in the process, a talent agent called Tigran, runs an outfit named after Noah, and sees his mission to save such young girls as a “religious matter”. If anything it’s the unreasonable level of trust shown by her parents that stands out, as they sign a contract in English and Japanese that they can’t understand (which includes clauses that allow almost any pretext to terminate the agreement at the discretion of the agency). There’s no sense that she is being pushed into a modelling career. She’s from a village outside the Siberian town of Novosibirsk, its winter chill memorably depicted in the opening shots, and her family background seems a supportive one (pictured right with her grandmother, and some potential magic slippers). There's more initial clarity in Nadya’s story. Vulnerability and coldness combine in her, as well as a need to control. Or witness her hospital operation to have tumours removed, which again raises an issue of (absent) children. Their unhappiness, loneliness and sense of being caught up in an anonymous system they don’t understand (literally, since they have little or no English, and no sign of a minder) will only repeat Ashley's own past.Īnd that’s before we see Ashley in her own home environment – a starkly modern Connecticut house, devoid of any personal touches, except for a couple of naked plastic dolls who spookily seem to be some sort of child surrogate (there had been a third one, Ashley admits, before she pulled it to pieces). We see home videos of her thoroughly miserable time a decade earlier modelling in Tokyo – and then her selling the experience to Russian girls in the provinces who are desperate for any route out into the wider world. The documentarist’s dilemma is whether to intervene or not in what they are filmingĪ sense of contradiction remains throughout the film, not least because of the character of their lead-in to the story, also called Ashley, in her time an American teenage model in Japan who has now turned scout looking for Russian hopefuls. Redmon and Sabin evidently aren't out to expose what they witnessed, just to illustrate – though the hints at murkier edges of the whole business are clear. That strong clash of cultures is enhanced by a distinction between sheer naivety - in Nadya’s expectations of what she will be doing - and the reality of an industry in which exploitation is all too often the name of the game.
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