Sexy Baby (2012) tribeca 2012

This is a look at female sexuality and body image via a 12 year old girl navigating life, a 22 year old teaching assistant with a body image problem, and an exotic dancer/porn star who just wants a normal life.

Sexy Baby is a film that will get you thinking. It’s a film that can’t help but make you react. It makes you think about gender and society. What exactly are we doing young women? What are we doing to ourselves? What does the infusion of porn like images doing to what we think we want?

You’ll forgive me for not going into a great amount of detail about this film, but I’m not at a place where I can really discuss it. It’s a film so full of ideas and thought provoking images that even though I saw this film Monday I’m still not done processing it.

To be honest when the film started I was kind of misdirected. The rapid fire images and shots of one of the films subjects little sisters doing suggestive things made me think that the film was going to be a radical feminist rant that bought up all of the typical clichés, instead the film started there and turned the whole subject of sex and women into a larger, far from clichéd, discussion.

I’m floored since while the film is very much about women’s sexuality it can’t help but also being about men and what men are being told they want or should want. It’s a film that is very much about who we are as a society.

I like the three pronged approach, the porn star who bought into the stereotypes, found empowerment, but not all the answers, the teacher who thinks she needs cosmetic surgery to look desirable, and the young girl who is beginning to navigate the minefield of this media driven thought. It’s an approach that helps make everything greater since we see how these things resonate on all levels.

If a film is suppose to make you think or provoke a reaction this film is the top of the heap since it does both.

I really like this film a great deal. I think its one of the few films I think that should be seen by everyone, whether you want to or not, because it will get a necessary dialog going.

A word of warning, while there is no graphic sex, there is graphic nudity of a literal gynecological sort. There also graphic images from a labiaplasty.

I’m sorry this isn’t more coherent, but this is a film I’m still thinking about.