THE COME-ON was irresistible. Polanski, the peep shows--everybody's been hot about the subject of sex and children. Everbody's been even hotter about Brooke Shields, the twelve-year-old model with the face of a twenty-year-old who plays the lead in Pretty Baby. and based on his previous work, French director Louis Malle seemed like the perfect candidate to tackle the subject--child prostitution in early 20th-century New Orleans. In Malle's hands, the film could be expected to either purge our inhibitions with sexual explicitness, or plague our consciences with subtle social commentary. But unfortunately, the film turns out to be confused in its subject and unfocused in its attack--a movie that never seems to know where it's headed. In the end it's almost pathetic--about as pathetic as a john in the middle of a whorehouse who can't figure out what to do with himself.

At the heart of the muddle is the alluring Brooke Shields. she is clearly the film's most marketable commodity, yet Malle never quite decides how to cash in. For saleable she is; her face has all the provocative potential the publicity shills lead you to believe, and she possesses an evident acting talent that here lies largely seem to decide whether to make Violet, the girl prostitute, into a victim or a vixen. Malle could have cast her as the silent but justice, like Anna in Carlos Saura's recent haunting film, Cria. Or Violet could have childhood--the kid forced to grow up too core of vulnerability. (Jodie Foster's teenage comes to mind.) Instead, Violet's is a face not to lurk in corners but to skip through halls. Her coping mechanism, if it can be called that, is a sort of bitchiness. But it is a bitchiness that is not so much protective as just plain infantile--selfish and self-indulgent.

THIS CHILDISH underdevelopment becomes clearest after a scene where Violet's virginity is auctioned off before a crowd of prominent customers. The rest of the girls are waiting downstairs during Violet's initiation. Before long we see the john sneaking out the back door, and the guilt and shame just about step forth from his face and confess. The other girls run up to Violet's room and find her collapsed and apparently unconscious on the bed--brutalized, sodomized, what can it be? We wait. But ha, ha, fooled you"! Violet pops up and scolds them selfish for not coming to her earlier. Shields' is a face that when it communicates anything says "me, me, me." But most of the time it doesn't even say that much; it rests apparently self-satisfied and oblivious to the implications of her environment. Disappointingly, this lack of depth also undermines her sensuality. An adult in the body, we think, would have been a turn-on. But a child in the body of a child is a "so what?" Perhaps that was the message Malle meant to put across. "So what?" he might have been saying, "that's right, so there!" But we're nonetheless left with the same reaction: So what?

The seedy brothel atmosphere that surrounds Violet is equally unexplored. How Malle will photograph the setting of the Storyville section of New Orleans is an obvious question, since the plot itself draws attention to photography. In his screenplay Malle crosses Violet's path with that of a photographer named E.J. Bellocq, an actual figure who shot a series of photographs of Storyville prostitutes in 1912. (Here he arrives to take pictures and ends up living with Violet and finally wedding her.) Malle also has an acute aesthetic sense; his other films have been very painterly in their effects and often masterful in their compositions. But in his other films, the richness of photography served to evoke his themes. In Lacombe, Lucien, the pale yellows and faded textures reflected the sultry French provincial world where even fascism unfolds at a meandering pace. And in a sleeper called The Thief of Paris, the visual opulence and use of decorative objects created just the sort of decadent bourgeois dreamworld that Malle's meant to attack. But in this film the visual effects, like baby, are just pretty. All Malle's often exquisite camerawork is good for are fleeting moments of aesthetic satisfaction.

NOR DO EITHER the plot or the acting provide the continuity that the cinematography lacks. The peek-a-boo piece in Playboy led us to believe that Violet's mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon) would be a reluctant and ambitious hooker who dreamed of getting out. But Sarandon the ruthlessness to flesh out that theme. She simply ups and weds one of her johns in the middle of the movie--leaving Violet being and leaving us wondering why she did it, and where we missed something. Less self-explanatory still is David Carradine's portrayal of the photographer-suitor, Bellocq. When he first intrudes on them the house madame calls him an "invert"--he begins to just hang around, looking less like a sinister voyeur than a dazed peanut vendor at a ballpark. The scene where he finally admits his love for Violet lacks both preparation and emotion: I'm all yours, Violet," he says--but Carradine doesn't seem to be all there. Occasionally he is testy and impetuous, presumably because all artists should be temperamental. But his fits express less the mercurial quality of genius as the self-consciousness of a sexually insecure teenager. Malle could have centered the plot around the intriguing archetype of the aging pervert and the precocious harlot. But instead he gave us two children who pretty much deserve each other.

There are at least two memorable performances in the film--but they come from characters on the periphery. One is Francis Faye's Madam Nell, the whorehouse madam. She delivers a series of deadpan wise-cracks with the dry timing of a George Burns, and this cool sexual sarcasm produces a clever variation on Mae West's old routines. But in the end the bit doesn't mesh with the plot; it is precisely because of her toughness that we fail to be touched her Madame Nell goes crazy after the authorities shut down the brothel. The house's black piano player, played by Antonio Fargas and presumably modeled after Jelly roll Morton, provides the other. Yet his relation to Violet is never made clear. There are a few winking--"come over here, Violet and let me tell you about life"--scenes between the two. But Shields always seems too distracted to establish a thought-providing rapport (between, clearly, two helpless victims of the same system of exploitation). When Violet's virginity is served up, Fargas stands in the corner and looks sullenly down his elegant equine nose at the degenerate bidders. But it is not clear whether his roving glance is one of condemnation or hidden lust. This could be the most telling moment in the film. But as throughout the rest of the movie, Malle neglects to give us the proper emotional preparation.

IT WOULD BE much easier to be charitable to this film if the subject did not have so much potential-- and if Malle hadn't seemed the perfect director to handle it. Of all contemporary French filmmakers, Malle has been the most subtle in his treatment of sexual hang-ups and societal perversions. It would have been hoped that he could do with our cultural inhibitions about child sexuality what he did with the incest taboo in Murmur of the Heart. Or that with his genius for cinematic austerity he could have conveyed the every-dayness of this sort of corruption, as he did with the drift toward fascism in Lacombe, Lucien. In that film he moved us through understatement. In this film, he doesn't seem to have anything clear enough to understate. A movie like Lacombe, Lucien gave physical and visual life to the idea of the banality of evil. But in Pretty Baby there is never an idea to give life to. The only conclusion we can draw is also the verdict on the film. Banality itself is in fact boring.