Alice. (15.)
Directed by Josephine Mackerras.
Starring Emilie Piponnier, Martin Swabey, Chloé Boreham, Jules Milo and Levy Mackerras. In French with subtitles. Available to stream. 105 mins.
For any film critic, the indignant "I've never paid for it in my life," is an almost sacred credo by which to live. Let me tell you, the sight of a pack of film reviewers descending on a free bar is not an easy one to recover from. Movies, alcohol, food, we try to avoid paying for it all; we'll hoover up anything that isn't nailed down. It is our due, and our calling. Paying for sex though is not a quandary any of us are in a financial position to concern ourselves with; unless you know of any sex workers willing to trade services for a box of used Criterion Collection review discs. Anyway, on the evidence of this French film, the world of the high-end escort is not all it is cracked up to be.
Alice is another entry in the cinema's almost Gladstonian concern for the plight of fallen women. When Alice (Piponnier) discovers that her would-be author husband (Swabey) has cleaned out their joint account, her desperation to keep the flat her and her son call home leads her to start working at the same high-class escort agency that her husband had squandered all their money at. Quelle irony. Initially horrified at the idea she quickly sees it as a quick and easy way to make absurd amounts of money.
The drama is well-acted and entertaining but never entirely convincing. Alice enters a wonderland where not remarkably attractive or sexually skilled women can command fees of over £1000 an hour. It seems to me the film is merging two fantasies about the sex industry. There's the male one that behind its seedy image actually it is a nice decent industry made up of reasonable transactions between two willing partners, rather than the customer interface of the international slave trade. Dovetailing into that is the female one of the empowered sex worker, who is exploiting rather than exploited.
There's a Victorian prudishness to the film's view of sex as a compulsion for strange little men that is unpleasant but fundamentally harmless. All the johns are short timid men who wouldn't hurt a fly. Surely the kind of men who can fritter away 12,000 euros just to avoid the chore of self relief is likely to be a ruthless individual, a much less pleasant kind of wanquer.
Directed by Josephine Mackerras.
Starring Emilie Piponnier, Martin Swabey, Chloé Boreham, Jules Milo and Levy Mackerras. In French with subtitles. Available to stream. 105 mins.
For any film critic, the indignant "I've never paid for it in my life," is an almost sacred credo by which to live. Let me tell you, the sight of a pack of film reviewers descending on a free bar is not an easy one to recover from. Movies, alcohol, food, we try to avoid paying for it all; we'll hoover up anything that isn't nailed down. It is our due, and our calling. Paying for sex though is not a quandary any of us are in a financial position to concern ourselves with; unless you know of any sex workers willing to trade services for a box of used Criterion Collection review discs. Anyway, on the evidence of this French film, the world of the high-end escort is not all it is cracked up to be.
Alice is another entry in the cinema's almost Gladstonian concern for the plight of fallen women. When Alice (Piponnier) discovers that her would-be author husband (Swabey) has cleaned out their joint account, her desperation to keep the flat her and her son call home leads her to start working at the same high-class escort agency that her husband had squandered all their money at. Quelle irony. Initially horrified at the idea she quickly sees it as a quick and easy way to make absurd amounts of money.
The drama is well-acted and entertaining but never entirely convincing. Alice enters a wonderland where not remarkably attractive or sexually skilled women can command fees of over £1000 an hour. It seems to me the film is merging two fantasies about the sex industry. There's the male one that behind its seedy image actually it is a nice decent industry made up of reasonable transactions between two willing partners, rather than the customer interface of the international slave trade. Dovetailing into that is the female one of the empowered sex worker, who is exploiting rather than exploited.
There's a Victorian prudishness to the film's view of sex as a compulsion for strange little men that is unpleasant but fundamentally harmless. All the johns are short timid men who wouldn't hurt a fly. Surely the kind of men who can fritter away 12,000 euros just to avoid the chore of self relief is likely to be a ruthless individual, a much less pleasant kind of wanquer.
