Reviewed by Glenn Gaslin (October/November 2006) Directed by Lauren Greenfield. With patients of Florida's Renfrew clinic. It's not a pretty picture: girls who eat 200 calories a day, who are force-fed through tubes bored into their stomachs, who hoard pills for planned overdoses, who weigh 86 pounds and wail about how fat they are. But it's a riveting picture, one from which Greenfield's camera never shies as she keeps an unrelenting lens on four women "locked-in" at a hard-core treatment center for eating disorders. Greenfield, best known for her searing photos documenting women and body image, shoots in sparse vérité, and we can do nothing to help these girls as they battle demons that make them purge, starve and destroy themselves. Without a word of narration, this stark essay delivers a damning portrait of girl-on-girl cruelty, a body-obsessed culture and a drug-happy healthcare system. Eat up. |
