It looks like another splendid talent competition, meant to bring out all the young girls in a distant corner of Siberia, bringing them hope with promises of glamor and remuneration through the world of international modeling.
In the chilling documentary “Girl Model,” making its television debut tonight to close the 25th season of “POV” (PBS, 10 p.m., check local listings), an American scout named Ashley Arbaugh can talk freely about each of the young girls’ shortcomings — none know her English. She’s picking candidates particularly for the Japanese market, which pay top dollar for the young and young looking model. And the doe-eyed girl she chooses, Nadya Vall, is only 13.
The whole village is excited for her, but it all turns to pain as soon as she lands in Tokyo and nobody is there to meet her. She wanders around the airport for hours, lost, before she finds her way to the tiny apartment she shares with another Russian, already disillusioned at the process.
They don’t know the language, but they head out to various agencies who give them tough scruitiny. No money comes in and they start to starve a little. At the same time, one finds a way out of her contract by trying to gain weight so she’ll be sent home.
The film seitches back to Arbaugh, talking about her own experiences of having been a similar international model at a young age and not treated well. That she’s inflicting it all on a new generation may be a way to pass along her own pain. The filmmakers make it seem so, showing her in her sterile Connecticut condo where her companions are plastic baby dolls, and showing the fibroid tumor that grew inside her like some sort of guilt.
It’s well into the film before Arbaugh mentions that many young models are also shuffled off to older men who want sexual experiences with young girls. They’re already selling their bodies, they figure, so they go that way.
All Nadya wants to do is just go home. Even seeing a picture of herself finally in a magazine, hardly recognizable, is something she only finds by accident at the newsstand and has to put down some of her own money to pay for.
“Girl Model” is an unsettling film that gets under your skin and shines a light beyond this particular enterprise to the idea of exploiting the very young whatever the damage.
To help snap you out of its spell, there are also a couple of those animated StoryCorps shorts worth waiting for.