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The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins

• Directed by Pietra Brettkelly
• Starring Vanessa Beecroft
• Classification: PG
• 

Vanessa Beecroft is the art star whose work - she's given to live tableaus of nude women posed motionless in a vast gallery space - has been exhibited around the world. Madit and Mongor are the Sudanese twins, motherless children left by their impoverished father to the care of a small village orphanage.

Fate decrees that the artist will cross paths with the twins, whereupon she is seized by twin urges - to personally adopt the infants and to professionally use them in her art. Meanwhile, fate further decrees that this intersection will come to the attention of New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly, who is taken with a similar urge to pursue her aesthetic interest and benefit from the whole scenario by, of course, making a documentary.

Such is the background of this strange, frequently disturbing, sometimes rambling, always unnerving nexus between life's messy motives and art's ordered demands. Much of the footage focuses on Beecroft - stylish, cosmopolitan, in her early middle years - during a specific visit to Sudan to meet the infants, at that point merely months old. There, accompanied by her own photographer and a trusty assistant, she scurries about fretting over her dual tasks, conferring with various officials to promote the paperwork for the adoption, but also deploying the kids as models in a makeshift studio.

A single shot, carefully staged (she has brought along the dress for the occasion), obsesses her: The artist herself nursing the children, one at each breast, a pair of undernourished black babies suckled by a benevolent white woman. Later, in a Milan gallery, that photograph will excite much controversy and advance her career - learned commentators detect an admirable new maturity in her work.

To be sure, Beecroft is acutely aware of the fraught symbolism in the image - the colonial reverberations, the religious resonance, the pop culture winks at the acquisitive likes of Angelina Jolie and that other Madonna. This awareness definitely gives the photo its disturbing power, but, apparently, does nothing to deter Beecroft's continuing wish to bring the twins back to her New York home, to the place that houses her own two daughters, her Scandinavian nanny, her Jamaican housekeeper, and Greg her sociologist husband. Oh, one more thing: She has yet to inform Greg of her mission - the guy's completely unaware of any family additions.

A strange journey, indeed. En route, Brettkelly intermittently cuts away from Sudan to splice in interviews with the artist's Italian mother and English father and with Greg too, establishing her troubled psychiatric past (an OCD diagnosis, a stint on Zoloft) along with her rocky domestic present (the now-informed hubby strongly disapproves of the adoption). The film flirts with tedium here. At first intrigued, we, much like the folks around her, start to grow a bit weary of the egoist at the centre of the tale, and tired of watching cameras in search of footage shooting more cameras in search of other footage.

Still, there's something about Beecroft, with her softly whispering voice and her pre-Raphaelite air, that keeps bringing us back and drawing us in. So thoughtful one moment, so superficial the next, she's as shallow and deep as the art she creates. But our intrigue isn't confined to her. As the film tacks on a rather contrived climax, plus a provocative denouement, we wonder who is serving whom here, and how to measure the blurred line that separates those taking advantage from those being taken advantage of. Certainly, exploitation abounds here, and profitably so: The art star is touring the galleries; this film is making the rounds of the theatres.

As for the Sudanese twins, I'll obey my own aesthetic instinct and keep you in suspense about their eventual fate - yes, the exploitation continues.