The Notorious Bettie Page

Exploring the life of the enduringly famous pin-up girl and American sex icon, The Notorious Bettie Page strikes a curious balance between prurience, politics and social observation.

It opens with a deliciously detailed sleazy New York cityscape, neon signs advertising Kinsey's whiskey, furtive strangers slipping into shops to ogle pin-up magazines. In this environment, repression itself is fetishised, yet the extent of repression in wider society is presented in a way which modern audiences will find shocking, being probably unaware of the extent of such legislative tendencies today.

Into this world steps Bettie, bold, resilient and possessed of a kind of innocence which her surroundings never seem to quench. The film's treatment of her is impressively restrained, never sensational, challenging the legend to examine the character of the woman at its heart. In this context, Bettie's religion is never set at odds with her work in the sex industry; her moral progress is as significant a theme as the progress of her career, but there is no weighing up of one set of values against another. By presenting both her convections and her doubts, the film allows a surprising amount of freedom for viewers to make up their own minds.

The problem with this open, distanced approach is that it tells us too little about the passions of the people involved. The film is poorly paced and drags in places whilst failing to fill out important detail in others. The abuse Bettie suffered in her childhood and marriage is only hinted at, and difficulties in her later long-term relationship are examined only briefly, resolution and compromise being glossed over in a way which detracts from the viewer's intimacy with the characters. The result is a film which feels fragmented and dissolute, sometimes insubstantial. Scenes involving Bettie's work have, by contrast, such energy and verve that they unbalance the whole, though they do serve to keep the attention of the viewer - there's always more fun on its way. Many of these scenes are very wittily written, whilst others employ an old-fashioned style of scripting which compliments the old-fashioned visuals (the film is shot partly in black and white, and on varying kinds of film stock) but isn't ultimately very interesting.

As with any biopic, what really matters is the performance of the lead, and here Gretchen Mol excels, conjuring up a remarkable physical resemblance and capturing Bettie's little moves and gestures perfectly. What lets her down is simply that she's too thin (which, in the context of what has made Bettie so enduringly popular, really does matter); the other models likewise conform to modern rather than 'fifties standards of beauty, which makes this film about censorship feel as if it has been the victim of a newer taboo.

Fortunately there has been no attempt to tidy up the quality of the carefully recreated photoshoots, which are presented here in all their ridiculous glory and are all the more charming for it. Mol's engaging performance ensures that the film is always watchable and parts of it really are a delight. It's just a shame that it doesn't pack the punch it could have done.