Broomfield, a sly, poker-faced veteran English documentarian (“Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer”), arrives in Hollywood armed with cash to flush out the Heidi story. He wants to understand how an upper-middle-class physician’s daughter became the madam of choice to Hollywood’s A list. But Heidi is detained in a drug-rehab program while she awaits her verdicts for pandering and tax evasion. Broomfield follows the trail of her girls – picking up lurid, kinky tales of rented sex along the way – before hitting pay dirt with the little old lady known as Madam Alex. Once the queen mother of Hollywood flesh peddlers, she’s a poison toadstool consumed with loathing for the man who introduced Heidi to her – Ivan Nagy – the swaggering Hungarian sometime filmmaker whom she claims stole her business away. Nagy, alleged here to be a pimp, informant and, according to several girls in the documentary, a woman-beater, hurls insults back at Madam Alex: she’s “pure evil.”
Fleiss’s former lover, Svengali and – Broomfield leads us to believe – ultimately her Judas, Nagy comes to dominate the film the way he seems to have transfixed Fleiss herself. It’s Heidi’s obsessive, love-hate relationship with this seductive slimeball – she’s only attracted to older men – that fascinates Broomfield, and gives the film its surprising psychological twist. The self-destructive Heidi easily emerges as the most sympathetic of a bad lot. She’s no innocent, but it’s clear that she took a fall like no other Hollywood madam because she didn’t play ball with the Los Angeles Police Department, who had always protected the likes of Madam Alex in return for information. I’d like to have seen Broomfield explore this more – to what ends was the L.A.P.D. collecting files on clients of upper-crust brothels? But that’s another movie. This one, hypnotic and wretchedly funny, casts a queasy light on the dangerous world of a reckless young woman addicted to quick bucks, celebrity and the abusive love of powerful old men.
