Movie Review

Sadia Afrin Arin

THE movie “Gia” is based on the life of Gia Carangi, America's first super model of 1970s. The movie starts with glamour and ends in absolute tragedy as Gia's fairy tale life falls apart as she dies of AIDS. I think Angelina Jolie was the perfect actress to play Gia's role.

Michael Cristofer is the director of this movie and for making this movie Gia's personal journal has been used and some interviews have been taken from the different people she knew including photographers, fashion editors, friends, her girlfriend Linda and her mother Kathleen.

Gia's unhappiness greatly stemmed from the fact that she came from a broken family. When the story begins, Gia is introduced as a punk girl, working at her father's diner in Philadelphia. There she meets her boyfriend called Tom. After a while a photographer discovers her and her journey of modelling begins and she goes to New York with Tom. She does not want to be a model really and she hates to be photographed. As she starts her modelling life she also starts using drugs, which later lead to death. On the set of her first shoot she meets Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell) with whom she falls in love. It is obvious that Gia always looked for something like 'love'. Especially after the departure of her mother she always looked the love she got from her mother. In this movie Gia has a mother-daughter sort of relationship with her agent Wilhelmina Cooper (Dunaway) and she is like second mother to Gia. Her intimacy with Linda clearly reveals that Gia was bisexual but Linda had a boyfriend and Gia always wanted Linda to break up with her boyfriend. The scene, in which Linda asks Gia to choose between drugs and her, is a passionate and heartbreaking one with Jolie's excellent acting. However Gia picks drugs over Linda, her lover. She is even raped for twice by the people to whom she goes for taking drugs. Once she goes to rehab for getting rid of the drug addiction but it was too late as she was already infected by HIV. When she gets to know she has AIDS, she wants to stay with her mother for but her mother denies her. In the last few days of Gia's life, her mother is there beside her in the hospital and she sees Gia slowly dying.

The first half of this movie is filled with Gia's splendour, passion, fame and love for Linda but the second half shows Gia's beauty fading away as well as her fame. The way she dies is depressing and the title goes perfectly with Gia as she was “too beautiful to die, too wild too live”. Gia Carangi died in 1986, at the age of 26.

Different people would have different views about this movie but for me it is one of the best movies I have ever seen, which wonderfully represented a super model's personal and professional life.