Beauty on the Treadmill

[setsuled]

Watch on YouTube

The life of Gia Carangi, one of the first supermodels, is depicted as a tragic deterioration in 1998's Gia. Part of me thinks I'd have enjoyed this movie more if I'd ever been a drug user and had some first-hand experience with drug addiction. Then I remember I like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Naked Lunch and consider the possibility this is just a tedious movie. Angelina Jolie looks fantastic in it, though.

The first part of the film is the best, in which we meet Gia working at her father's diner, wielding a switchblade as a guy nervously tries to flirt with her. In the above trailer, you can see another memorable scene with the knife in which she carves her name into a receptionist's desk.

There's also a nice nude photoshoot, awkwardly filmed but made palatable by Jolie's beauty. She has a relationship with a makeup artist played by Elizabeth Mitchell that seems promising at first but ends up being the route to a reductive addiction story. Gia promises to stay clean, there's another disaster, she takes drugs, things get worse, she lies, etc.

Mila Kunis plays a young Gia in early scenes. It never occurred to me before how much she looks like Angelina Jolie.