36. Working Girls (Filles de joie); movie review

 

WORKING GIRLS (FILLES DE JOIE)

Cert TBA

91 mins

BBFC advice: TBA

"Would a husband know if his wife had been out all day, selling herself?" asked Mrs W.

"Well, you would think so because of her extra perfume but also the aftershave of her clients," I replied as if I knew what I was talking about.

It was one of the many questions provoked by Frédéric Fonteyne and Anne Paulicevich's Working Girls - a film with great potential it doesn't completely fulfil.

The movie stars Noémie Lvovsky as the aforementioned housewife and mother to two off-the-rails teenaged children.

Every day she and two neighbours (Sara Forestier and Annabelle Lengronne) drive over the border to Belgium to work at a brothel.

They are hardened to the sex industry and nothing shocks them behind the bedroom door.

However, they have home lives which apparently torment them more than their work.

For starters, Forestier's Axelle is scrambling to bring up three primary-age children while living in a flat with them and her feckless mother (Els Deceukelier).

That would be enough on most people's plate but she also has an estranged and violent ex-husband (Nicolas Cazalé).

Meanwhile, Lengronne plays her best friend who believes that her current boyfriend will be the one who leads to a life of normality.

That seems a long way from an estate where teenagers verbally abuse their elders and even post sexual conquests on social media.

Unsurprisingly, sex is very much to the fore in Working Girls but neither Mrs W nor I felt that it was gratuitous nor overdone.

Instead, there is quite a bit of concentration on the camaraderie among the women and humour surrounding the clients.

The acting from all women is convincing but our problem arose through the directors' clumsy use of movie techniques such as flashbacks or, on one occasion, Rashomon.

It simply made the film uneven and difficult to follow.

And that was a shame. Time would have been better spent on storyline development

Reasons to watch: Gritty, well-acted drama.

Reasons to avoid: Jolts around making it difficult to follow

Laughs: Two

Jumps: None

Vomit: None

Nudity: Yes

Overall rating: 6/10

Did you know? Prostitution in Belgium is legal but certain related activities such as soliciting and pimping are illegal. Human trafficking or exploiting individuals involved in prostitution is punishable by a maximum prison sentence of 30 years.

The final word. Anne Paulicevich: I have wanted to write about the heroism of women for a long time. When I learned that I was pregnant and that I was going to have a girl, it was a shock: how do you bring a little girl into the world when you see the extent of violence against women? It was all the more unbearable to me since at that point I was breaking out of a toxic friendship and working relationship with a man myself. He had run over me so badly that I sometimes wanted to throw myself out the window. But I was going to be a mother, so instead of killing myself, I was going to kill a man in my script."

    

 

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