Malgorzata Szumowska, “Elles” (2011)
An interesting and layered film that appears to say whatever viewers may want it to say, “Elles” initially presents as a critique of the kind of bourgeois society in which the ideals of freedom, equality and equal distribution of wealth for all are taken for granted side by side with an economic system that exploits youth, women and the disenfranchised in the form of two female university students, one from overseas, who find that to finance their studies in France they must prostitute themselves to wealthy businessmen. Anne (Juliette Binoche), a feminist journalist with a women’s magazine, undertakes an assignment to interview university students on how they survive and study in France’s current economic climate after the onslaught of Sarkozynomics. She discovers that two of her subjects, Lola (Anais Demoustier) and Polish foreign exchange student Alicja (Joanna Kulig), are living as hookers. At first Anne is shocked by the girls’ decision to subordinate their bodies and sexuality to the demands of older, wealthier men but her conversations with the students, illustrated in live action flashbacks, lead the journalist to the realisation that these students have the freedom, independence and money she thought she had but doesn’t as she compares her life, married to an executive, Patrick (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and barely coping with two rebellious sons and a house in chaos, with that of the girls.
The film is graphic with several scenes of sexual intercourse between the girls and their middle-aged pudgy clients that range from the pathetic (one client is impotent) to the near-horrific (a scene with a baby-faced client insinuates sadism and use of a champagne bottle for rape) and the tone is bleak and matter-of-fact. Interestingly, most sexual scenes feature very little face-to-face intimacy and quite a lot of doggy-style intercourse and fellatio. Binoche’s character sometimes appears as aged and unglamorous, especially in a scene in which she masturbates on the bathroom floor while her young son calls for her.There is subtle character development, illustrated by close-ups in which characters say nothing and do all their acting with facial expressions and moving glances; Binoche’s acting is exceptional and is one reason to see this film. Camera-work is excellent and portrays the shallow and empty life Anne leads at home away from her interview subjects. It’s not surprising then that Anne is drawn more and more into her subjects’ lives and the professional distance she half-heartedly maintains melts away quickly, almost luring her into a tryst with Alicja, and leading to her own sexual self-discovery; she questions the worth of her life as wife, mother and supposed feminist, and seems ready to throw everything she has away in a scene that might be (erm) climactic.
However (spoiler alert) Anne doesn’t quite self-destruct and she resolves to mend her relationship with hubby Patrick but, in a scene reminiscent of the plot twist in Luis Bunuel’s famous “Belle de jour”, in which a similar bourgeois wife also discovers a new sexual identity through contact with prostitution and attempts to revive her marriage, the attempt fails and both Anne and Patrick continue in their facade, acting out their roles. Indeed there are many parallels between “Elles” and “Belle de jour”: prostitution is held up as a mirror to and criticism of the shallow lives of middle class women accustomed to wealth, privilege, freedom and independence, or what passes for these concepts. Contact with prostitution reveals the lie to both Severine and Anne but both women find themselves unable to escape from their sexually impotent husbands.
Of course neither “Elles” nor “Belle de jour” reveals the complexity behind prostitution: a hint of the physical danger to prostitutes appears in both but the films are not interested in showing the reality of prostitutes’ lives and how brutal, dreary and emotionally draining, even damaging, prostitution can be. If only a film could be made that contrasts the sordidness of paid-for prostitution and its equivalent in the lives of married middle and upper-class women, combined with what that parallel says about the narrow choices women face in Western societies, how those prevent true intimacy between men and women, and how this leads men into pornography and the sex industry in their search for intimacy, reinforcing their feelings of sexual inadequacy and strengthening the vicious cycle that keeps intimacy between the sexes at bay: now that would certainly be a film, however dispassionate, bleak and graphic it might be, worth watching. “Elles” gropes its way towards to a critique of Western capitalist society and the way it exploits both men and women and denies them their sexuality, but fails dismally perhaps because Szumowska and her co-writer didn’t or couldn’t quite grasp the scale of what they were tackling.