The film is another common-sensical, inspiriting paean to the mystery and variety of ordinary experience by one of our most original film makers. ''Gap-Toothed Women'' is something else entirely. or Myth?'' also never lets the audience forget that the business of beauty pageants is business, the promotion of commerce (supermarkets, products, real estate developments) through the promotion of a comparatively narrow idea of beauty. Perhaps the most effective testimony is offered by Debra Johnson, an unsuccessful contestant at the 1985 Miss California contest, who politely points out that in 62 years no ''woman of color'' has ever won the California pageant. Another woman calls it the ''original'' women's lib movment. Other defenders of the Miss America contest talk about the pageant's scholarship program. Lee Ann Meriwether, who was Miss California of 1954 and Miss America of 1955, defends beauty pageants without whitewashing them. She recalls filling out her Miss America application form and feeling compelled to note that she once suffered from bulimia, though she credits the Miss America program with helping her to get over it. As the climax of her protest (during which the counterdemonstrators chant ''Dress meat, not women''), Miss Simonton puts on a bathing suit made out of pork ribs and slabs of other kinds of raw meat and splashes the steps of the pageant hall with a plastic bag of her own blood.Įventually, even Miss Davenport seems to have some second thoughts. The principal spokeswoman for the opposition is Ann Simonton, a successful model as a teen-ager who, at 19, was gang-raped and now sees beauty pageants as promoting values that enourage rape in a society that debases women. ''I hate to say this,'' she says (and then says it), ''but they are not the example of womenhood I would like to follow. Lisa Davenport, Miss California of 1985-86, at first takes a very haughty view of the women who have so noisily expressed their dissatisfaction with the official pageant. As is known by anyone who's ever watched the Miss America show on television, nothing is much funnier or more disturbing than the intensity of the carefully rehearsed sincerity displayed by the women who participate. Satire is built into the institution itself. Schwartz can't entirely avoid sending up the whole idea of American beauty pageants. In documenting the history of the Miss California contest at Santa Cruz and of the Miss America pageant to which all Miss Californias go with hopes and busts held high, Mr. Topping the Film Forum program is Les Blank's 30-minute delight, ''Gap-Toothed Women,'' which looks at and listens to women who happen to have a slight space between their two upper front teeth and feel just fine about it. or Myth?,'' directed by Geoffrey Dunn and Mark Schwartz, is a straightforward, 60-minute repertorial account of the Miss California beauty pageant and of its counterpageant, the feminist Myth California contest.
BEAUTIFUL women or, rather, the differing ideas of what constitutes beauty in women are the shared theme of the two excellent documentaries that open today at the Film Forum 1.
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