16 June 2003

The Girl Next Door

Oklahoman Stacy Baker agrees to her husband’s desire to see her naked in the pages of Gallery magazine’s Girl Next Door section (hence the title of this movie) and the resulting pictorial is enough to attract the attention of other magazines and film producers to the extent that, with a little money from a number of such projects, Stacy leaves Oklahoma and her husband to land in California, take on a new name (Valentine), and pursue her career in the adult film industry. It is not clear at what point filmmaker Christine Fugate latched onto Stacy as her next project (the subtitles are annoyingly absent sometimes and the order of events and the intervening intervals obscure) but the website claims 22 months of filming (along with many complaints of no budget ) in which Fugate followed Valentine to the sets (such as they were, and the property owners are never identified) and the doctor’s offices (as Stacy gets her body parts moved around and replaced) and the residences (as Stacy ponders her life and tries a relationship with another industry performer, Julian) and back at least once to her mother for a visit. Nothing much was new to me, but the scenes of liposuction and breast implant replacement have a detachment and ruthlessness that is instructive.