Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (DVD)

You'd think that Nick Bloomfield has some kind of fascination with the sex industry. This is not the first time that he's dabbled in the mucky world of sexually sordid expolits. It's not exactly his most successful either. That's not a comment on the documentary as such. Nick is terrifically talented and original - you can tell his style of flying-along-by-the-seat-of-its-pants type documentary a mile off. Sometimes it works brialliantly like the one he did on Tracking Down Maggie, and sometimes he just can't pin the person down, just like this one with Heidi Fleiss. Heidi is an ex-call girl with celebrity connections. What she ...

British documentary director Nick Broomfield is no stranger to the sex business. His early study of a legal Nevada brothel, Chicken Ranch, is a superlative study of sex work. By comparison, his portrait of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss is a profound disappointment. Broomfield's style is to feign naivety. With his thinning hair, boyishly disingenuous and slightly hangdog expression, and microphone in hand (he's his own sound recordist, accentuating the feeling that he's not really The *Director*), he bumbles in like some stereotype English buffoon from a 1960's comedy. Of course it's a carefully studied ploy to put his subjects at their ...