At just 11 years old, Brooke Shields delivers a performance that is both hauntingly natural and profoundly unsettling. She does not play Violet as a victim or a vixen; instead, she portrays her as a child who has absorbed the only logic she knows: sexuality is currency, and childhood is a temporary inconvenience.

To stream Pretty Baby today is to feel the dissonance acutely. The film is exquisitely made—a time capsule of a lost New Orleans, dripping with atmosphere. Keith Carradine’s Bellocq is a masterpiece of repressed longing. Susan Sarandon is luminous and heartbreaking. But every frame featuring Violet is now filtered through the lens of #MeToo, of child actor advocacy, of a belated reckoning with how Hollywood consumed youth.