Bettie Page Reveals All

What makes good storytelling work is provocative authenticity, and that is the key to Mark Mori’s biopic about the sex icon Bettie Page.

Mori started filmmaking knowing this when his directorial debut entitled Building Bombs in 1990 was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. Nearly 23 years later, Bettie Page Reveals All might as well be named Building Bombshells, because that’s exactly what he does here.

What works for Mori’s film is he rarely has other people speaking about the late, great Page, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 85. Instead, Mori lets Page do the storytelling. For a majority of the film, she does voice-overs on stills and video of her time starting in the 1950s. What makes it so great is the juxtaposition of Page’s aged, raspy voice with a slight Nashville vibrato discussing nude photos of herself. After many quips and very personal insights, she lets out a rolling giggle, bringing the audience into the joke with her, like when she moved back to Florida and found an old boyfriend with whom she’d make love with at the drive-in movie theatre. “I taught him everything he knew. When we met, he didn’t even know how to kiss.”

While commenting on the push for sexual repression in the 1950s with video of a herself naked, she says, “I don’t even believe God disapproves of nudity. After all, he put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden naked.”

Where the film suffers, however, is in the parts where Page herself isn’t speaking. The five-minute intro is filled with quickly-cut, one-sentence lines from current famous models, pornography historians and personalities like Perez Hilton. Throughout the film, Page’s interviews are interrupted as others explain what everyone already knows: She one of the biggest adult culture propagators in history.

It takes about an hour for the story to delve into Page’s mysterious disappearance from the public eye at the very peak of her notoriety, but it’s worth it. Page reveals her fallout from modeling and her fanatical acceptance of the Bible’s teachings and a nervous breakdown that led to a stay in a psychiatric hospital.

The film finishes with her chronicled resurgence as a leader in realizing sexuality as a normal part of life. “I never thought of myself as anything special or important. I was just doing my job and enjoying every bit of it,” she says.”

BETTIE PAGE REVEALS ALL (3) • Directed Mark Mori •Starring Bettie Page, Dita Von Teese, Hugh Hefner • Rated R • 101 min •At Osio Cinemas