(Wrote this for my ET column)
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Among my most satisfying viewing experiences of last year was a film I should have watched decades earlier – the 1976 thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, with 12-year-old Jodie Foster (she turned 13 during the shoot) as a girl who draws much attention from other townsfolk because she appears to be living by herself, her father mysteriously missing (*cue Twilight Zone music*). Shot a few months after Foster’s more famous, Oscar-nominated performance as a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, this role requires arguably an even greater display of poised “maturity”. I can’t discuss the plot without giving away spoilers, but suffice it to say that the protagonist Rynn runs a house and deals with adult visitors by herself, and even gets into a full-blown romantic relationship. And Foster is completely convincing throughout. She was a child prodigy in real life, hence perhaps well equipped to meet some of the demands of this part.
But the fact remains – she was barely a teenager. Does this knowledge make some difference to our perceptions? Was the shoot a “safe space” for her (to employ an overused phrase of today)?
There is a fleeting nude scene where Foster’s own older sister filled in as her body double – which means the adolescent was protected to a degree. But couldn’t that scene still result in a sexualising gaze directed at Rynn? What if a viewer doesn’t know about the body-doubling?
Then again, maybe this particular narrative is okay with such sexualising, maybe that’s even part of the point: the film is about a young person matter-of-factly leading an independent, self-sufficient life. In a sense the premise isn’t dissimilar from that of stories like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, about children placed in a position where they are reorganising a world, without supervision. In such cases, conventional notions about age-related appropriateness might not apply.
Anyway I thought about Foster again when a friend and I, discussing Shuchi Talati’s new film Girls will be Girls, mulled that the young lead Preeti Panagrahi was 20 or 21 when it was made, around three years older than her character (a schoolgirl named Mira). A three-or-four-year gap between actor and character doesn’t seem like much, but within the adolescence-teenage bracket it can mean plenty: a 19-year-old playing a 15-year-old can feel off-kilter, unrealistic, even inappropriate, in a way that a 50-year-old actor playing forty wouldn’t. But there are also reasons for such casting, when a very young person is depicted in certain situations. (Girls will be Girls has a discreetly presented masturbation scene involving Mira, and another where she tries to figure out how to put a condom on her boyfriend.)
A fictional character can be shown as doing anything – within the plausibility of the world being depicted – but it’s a grey area to have under-age actors enact things they might not have actual life experience of. And strict guidelines, parental supervision and intimacy coordinators aren’t always enough. Even the TV series Riverdale, known for being edgy and subversive, mainly used performers who were in their twenties when the first season was shot. (KJ Apa, who played Archie, was the youngest at 19, but even he felt a little too well-built and jockish for the iconic red-headed high-schooler. And Cole Sprouse, as Jughead, was twenty-four going on sixteen.)
We have come a long way (at least in mainstream films where many safety nets are in place) from the time when a six-year-old Shirley Temple was image-managed to be a wee replica of a glamorous adult star (to use Graham Greene’s controversial but accurate description, “infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult”), but even with the best intentions and more sensitised handling today, some scenes involving child actors can be discomfiting: e.g. 10-year-old Kiernan Shipka as Sally in Mad Men, “touching herself” while watching a TV show late at night; or a romantic kiss between Nicole Kidman and a child actor in Birth.
That said, some young performers are so canny and blasé in real life that lines get blurred. Auditioning for the lead in The Exorcist, 13-year-old Linda Blair casually said “she masturbates with a crucifix” while describing the film’s plot. A startled William Friedkin, after a glance at Blair’s real-life mother, asked the girl if she knew what that meant. “It’s like jerking off, isn’t it?” Blair said. “Have you ever done that?” Friedkin asked. “Sure, haven’t you?” Blair replied. Little wonder she got the part of the demon-possessed child.
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P.S. as it happens Jodie Foster had major roles in as many as FIVE films that were released in 1976 – including at least two, Bugsy Malone (which is constructed on the conceit of child actors playing adult roles) and Freaky Friday (mother-daughter switching bodies) that by their very nature require forms of “adult acting”. Because she had a career lull in the 1980s, it is easy to forget that her childhood acting stint was solid all by itself.
(Another somewhat related piece on child performers, in a Chaplin and Kiarostami film, is here.)
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