In a documentary, Brooke Shields opens up about her toxic marriage to André Agassi, her fight with Tom Cruise and reveals she was raped at the age of 20 – Credits: @instagram.com/brookeshields
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this Friday. Pretty baby, Brooke Shields, the documentary that chronicles the life of the protagonist of La Laguna Azul from the start of her career, when she was portrayed as a prepubescent “sex symbol”, the stormy relationship she had with her mother Teri, her toxic romance with tennis player André Agassi and his media feud with Tom Cruise. There the interpreter also speaks for the first time about the rape to which she fell victim at the age of 20.
The documentary is directed by Lana Wilson, who was responsible for giving a snap of Taylor Swift’s life in Miss American. Its title is no coincidence: it was the name of the 1978 film by Louis Malle in which Shields played a prostitute girl. This film was met with severe criticism not only because of the naturalization of child prostitution, but also because of the scenes in which the then 9-year-old actress appeared naked.
With Keith Carradine in Pretty Baby
However, it also helped the media to insist on the idea of sexualizing girls and young people. That’s one of the axes of the story, depicting archival footage such as magazine covers featuring Shields as “the girl who drives men crazy,” or fragments of TV shows in which male drivers talk about her without brake or respect.
Although the actress has been offered several times to direct a documentary about her life, this is the first time she has felt ready to do so. For this reason, he provided the director with a lot of film material, but also image material and interviews. However, he chose to delegate the choice of narrative axes and emphases to Wilson: “I gave it to him [a Lana] the files and walked away. I said to him: ‘Your story and your point of view play a big part in this.’ I am a channel for a larger conversation. If I had told him: ‘Show the interview!’ then it would have been just about me and my own ego. At the beginning of the process I was very drifting, selfish and emotional. This was not meant to be a review of all the highlights of my career. It’s actually something bigger. I wanted to hand over the files and say, ‘The story evolves from what you see and from the narrative that you, the director, want to tell. It’s not my decision,” the actress told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Brooke Shields in a scene from the controversial film that made her famous
And he continued, “It’s a broader conversation about the sexualization of young women. I have been in the eye of this storm on many different levels over the decades. I was part of the conversation, or maybe not even part of the conversation, but part of the focus, and that narrative itself has changed over time depending on outside influences and the era. I am now a mother of two young women and the conversations we have about sexuality are very different now than they used to be. Personally, when I was a kid, there was very little conversation about it for me.”
The director’s approach was clear, and it was consistent with the reason Shields agreed to make a documentary about her life this time: “I’m not interested in the problems of famous people. What interests me is how fame can amplify and potentiate recognizable problems. life [de Brooke] It was extreme and utterly unique, but her experience of being a woman in the United States is terrifyingly relatable.”
One of the thematic axes of the film is the relationship of the actress with her mother, who made all the decisions at the beginning of her career while fighting a strong alcohol addiction. “I felt like my mother would be the focus of a lot of conversations. That didn’t surprise me. She’s always been a very controversial figure and a central figure in my life,” Shields said. And he recalled: “She was constantly, in most cases, negatively addressed by the press. And when I was a kid, I tried to defend her. It has been a common thread for much of my life. And the line continues in my relationship with my daughters. But what relieved me was that it showed the complexities of our relationship and the love that pervaded that complexity and the difficulties; the way this experience is tense without commenting on it. It was authentically presented so that people could see it and draw their own conclusions or use it as a vehicle to understand their own relationship with their mother.”
In his adulthood, another “controlling” presence joined that of his mother: that of tennis player André Agassi. “Both he and I were at turning points in our lives when we met,” the actress said in her autobiography, There Was a Little Girl. And the documentary picks up on that point. While he had just undergone another operation on his wrist, she was desperate to turn her career around.
They were contacted by Kenny G’s wife but at the time Shields was in South Africa filming Running Wild. It was 1993 and the only way to communicate in the early stages of their relationship was by fax. Some time later they met for the first time in Los Angeles, and after dinner he accompanied her home. And that night the problems started. As he was greeted by Teri, he knew that bonding with Brooke wouldn’t be easy. “I immediately noticed strange vibrations. I instinctively know, no matter what happens in the end, this woman and I will never get along,” he said in his autobiography.
Brooke Shields with her then-husband André Agassi
The truth is that beyond the cons and after four years of dating, they walked down the aisle. At the time, Shields had a role on the hit TV sitcom Friends and starred on her own show Suddenly, Susan. But, as he explains in the documentary, the toxic relationship he had with Agassi didn’t allow him to succeed. The tennis player’s fame as a womanizer had “tormented her with jealousy”.
She eventually found her ideal partner in now-husband Chris Henchy, but her dream of starting a family was not easy for her. After several attempts, she was able to give birth to her first daughter, Rowan. And she immediately fell into a postpartum depression that put her life on hold. Already recovered, she wrote the book Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. While she was promoting it, Tom Cruise was doing the same with the film The War of the Worlds. In this regard, the actor and staunch member of the Church of Scientology, who doubts psychological therapies and the effects of medication, assured at a press conference that the actress was “dangerous” because she said she had been taking antidepressants.
This led to a media confrontation that ended with the actor apologizing to him publicly, but the importance of this episode meant he was present in the documentary as well. At one point in the film, the camera zooms in on the headline of a comment Shields wrote in The New York Times, “What Tom Cruise Doesn’t Know About Estrogen.” Actor Judd Nelson then quotes Shields, “Tom Cruise should stick with fighting aliens. The protagonist, meanwhile, limited herself to describing the confrontation as “ridiculous”.
While all of these aspects of Shields’ life can be compelling, the truth is they were more or less addressed both by herself in her autobiography and by the media. However, the actress decided that the documentary gave her the support she needed to publicly confront for the first time an issue that was never revealed: the rape she was the victim of at the age of 20.
The actress won’t reveal the name of her attacker, but does share specific details that align with the hundreds of complaints that sparked the #MeToo movement and reveal a modus operandi by Hollywood’s powerful men. According to his story, he met this subject, whom he already knew, shortly after graduating from university. The meeting took place in a hotel bar, and the reason was to define the presence of the actress in a new film. When the meeting was over, he offered to go to her room and ask for a taxi to take her home. There he raped her.
“I was scared of drowning or something. I didn’t fight much, I was absolutely paralyzed. I figured my “no” should have been enough. I was just like, ‘Try to survive and get out of this,'” he recalled. After the attack, Shields called a friend who worked in security and, after telling him what had happened, told her he had been raped. “I’m not ready to believe that,” was the only sentence she managed to utter.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he explained: “I didn’t know if I would ever bring it up. It took many years of therapy before I could even talk about it. I’ve definitely worked very hard and learned to deal with it. And I’ve gotten to a point, and we’ve gotten to a point as a society, where we can talk a lot more openly about these things. I had no idea he would say that. But I hope, as a mother of two girls, that just by hearing about my incident, they will feel that I can become an advocate. Because this happens every day and it shouldn’t happen.”