Mes chères études

The movie is a bit strange and portrays the girl as very naive It starts out with a student fainting in class, turns out she haven't been eating in a while cause of poor economy, from there on the main story starts. After seeking advice from what I believe is the school Counsellor whom basically tell her to sue her parents or get more jobs. Than she somehow get the idea of trying prostitution. (At this point I sort of miss and explanation as to why she choose it so fast) It supposed to be a one time thing, but soon she spends all the money and she need to do it all over again. You get to see how she spends her hard earned money, while she's spending them. Dinner out with her friends paying for their drinks etc All the while you get to see these small cash signs in the air with a price tag of what the item cost her, It was and interesting way to illustrate how money just fly away sometimes. When you've been broke for a log time, you often fantasies about what you gonna spend all the money on when you get on the up and up. But once you get there you soon realize easy come easy go. So soon she needs money again and one client leads to another and another and so on and so forth. One thing that struck me as odd though, was that with every client she usually just lay there like a corpse while they do their thing. I may not know much about prostitution and the life of the average hooker, but I assume when you pay for sex you want some spark in it, however fake that spark must be. I'm pretty sure nobody pays a hundred Euros for a girl to lay there playing dead while you hammering away at her. Not unless you got some weird fantasy about them being dead, I'm pretty sure they would expect her to fake it at least Also the average client was usually men in their 50; it would have been nice with some diversities Another odd thing with the main character is that she seems to get more stupid/naive for each client she takes on. Which is usually quite the opposite of what normally happens in that line of work There are also bits and pieces that doesn't really go anywhere, which is a bit confusing But all in all not a bad movie,

IMHO there's a fair amount of commonality with "Slovenian Girl", although the type of naivety on show here is rather different, as Laura here is clearly supposed to be very intelligent in the conventional sense. She shares though the distinct air of not even pretending to give the guys a good time - which one would have thought was part of the "job", no matter how distasteful, exploitative, or unfair. In filmic terms, there's also an undramatic conclusion to both movies.

Where this is less convincing, however, was the financial aspect - quite apart from whether it is (was?) indeed possible for a student to survive in Paris given fees, bills and rent, even with a part-time job - once she *did* start earning money from prostitution it felt as if she was spending too much of the extra cash on inessentials, thus not fixing the original problem. Maybe the book makes this clearer, but if the underlying mission is to elicit sympathy for her position then this in my view was a missed opportunity.

Not a bad film, but not a comfortable watch.

Under the title "Student Services", I watched this film, not realizing it was a made-for-TV-movie based upon a true story.

The actress who portrays the main character, Laura, acquits herself fine. She plays a college student who has trouble paying her bills, so she turns to adult on-line ads to find meet men who will pay her for sexual favors.

The film is not erotic. Laura, for the most part, detests what she does.

The film may have been designed to put forth a political point of view--that too many students have financial problems, so they turn to illegal activities. Someone who lives in France might understand a political solution to this French problem, but others probably will not.

It is certainly no documentary. And it does not try to be.

As a drama, it offers little that is new to the genre, and Laura's path is marked by detours and confusing behavior, defusing the drama.

AKA: STUDENT SERVICES.

The story of the coed who has to compromise her values and sell herself to get by is not a new one. But here it is told with a certain vive and lifted by the lead Deborah Francois. Yes, she is lovely naked and spends a great deal of the film undressed, but it serves the plot well as she moves among men she meets online. She finds some encounters titillating, but finds most repulsive either in the moment or on reflection. After an innocent foray into selling her company, posing for photos and quickie sex, she gets gets in deeper, kinkier and caught up in a cycle from which she struggles to escape.

One finds out Laura is really relating her story of what she has to do to make ends met as a student. She is a language student, and in class, she collapses. It seems she wasn't eating enough, and she wasn't eating because she had no money. She shares a place with Manu, but the expenses became greater than she was originally told. She starts to look for jobs, and finds one that intrigues her at a decent payment. It is with Joe, a gym teacher, who simply wants to be with a young, pretty and naked girl. He seems nice, and pays well, but some of the other meetings with others do not go well, and she is raped. In telling Manu that she got raped just to pay the rent resulted in her leaving him in disgust, since he didn't care. She meets another student who is studying languages, and helps her out and she finds he really cares about her. But the idea of where her money comes from wears on him, and he becomes jealous and he starts to follow her. She leaves him, goes to Paris, but the higher costs there really cause problems, as no one wants to hire a student, as they want a person full time, and she wants her degree. So will this put her into a cycle she wants to escape from? The movie doesn't pull any punches. There are advantages and disadvantages to her in getting money, yet she cannot live without money. Some of the money she makes comes easily, and some comes at a terrible toll on her. It is not really erotic, just matter of fact and about survival. But can she break free of the cycle? Déborah François as Laura sells the movie.