Elles

According to some reports, great many female students in France financed their studies from prostitution. This film starts from this report. Juliette Binoche plays the journalist who interviews two of these girls. Many times.

She tries to analyze it all from a cold professional view, but finds that she is the one who changes and maybe also gets analyzed. The girls tell her they are abused sometimes, but Binoche is the one who takes the biggest injuries.

Interesting film about "Western morals" declining more and more in all ways, since we're not interesting in sharing profits like we used to. But the film is a little cold and and analyzing, just like a professional journalist should be.

We've seen similar films dealing with the subject of student prostitution, so when coming to view this, it's a tired watch. It's been all done before. The movie starts where we're further into the story, where journalist, Binoche, who carries the film in a great if bold performance, interviews two young beautiful girls, selling and indulging in sex with older men, kind of bringing much similarity, I would say to that later Art house film, Young And Beautiful, which I haven't yet seen. There are some truly hot sex scenes in this film, from our two lasses, one featuring a middle aged guy getting into Demoustier's lacey panties, and boy, does she want it. Slowly disassociating herself from her family, as well as having problems with the fridge door, Binoche immerses and loses herself into this life, becoming good friends with both girls, causing her to privately masturbate, and give hubby something he hasn't had in a while, where the film suddenly ends. The films fault, like Binoche losing herself, the film loses it's intentions, handling of story, where the movie shallowy touches on the subject, and doesn't go into enough depth of the girl's backgrounds, like why they do it, and what really has led em to this point, where meeting mommy of one of the girls, was at least something. But the film gets more caught up in the sex between call girl and client, which is the film's real failing. This was angrily disappointing in one sense, as the end credits rolled. It's Binoche's film, though. Watch it for her, the film's only strong savior.

This movie, like another recent French movie "Student Services", exposes the apparent current social problem of impoverished Parisian female university students resorting to prostitution. In America movies like this are generally preachy and alarmist and usually relegated to the Lifetime network where they're viewed mostly by bored housewives. I'm not exactly sure WHO these French movies are aimed at though, and they seem a little hypocritical. If you REALLY want to de-glamorize co-ed prostitution should you show quite so many scenes of impossibly attractive French actresses like Deborah Francois (in "Student Services") or Anais Demoustier (in this) having hot, naked, kinky sex? Women might appreciate the social message here, but most men will find it a little hard to concentrate on the message what with all the blood flowing from their brains to their boners. Even the middle-age female protagonist of this movie, a journalist played by Juliette Binoche, is so turned on by audiotapes of the Demnoustrier character's sex sessions that at one point she has to go in the bathroom and pleasure herself. She becomes so obsessed with her "expose" that she neglects her husband and children. She's definitely a strange, and not particularly likable, character.

The movie is also surprisingly kinky. Demoustier's prostitute character has wine bottle inserted in her butt by a sadistic client. Another Polish prostitute has her large breasts urinated on. These scenes aren't graphic, of course, but the fact that they're included at all--combined with a rather muddled moral message--definitely tends to move this toward lurid exploitation.

Binoche is not very good in this, but it might be the character she's saddled with. Demoustier is both sexy and adorable, but doesn't have much of a role, and her character pretty much disappears after the assault with the wine bottle. I didn't dislike this movie, but I prefer the similar "Student Services". It too seems a little at odds with itself message-wise, but it gives the major role to its sympathetic prostitute character. And it's not QUITE so exploitative and hypocritical.

I was expecting Juliette Binoche to be as fabulous as she normally is, but she was the disappointment among the three female leads.

To be fair, I think it was the fault of the part, rather than faults in her performance. I think the idea was that her character, the journalist, got so involved in what she was researching and writing that she forgot about her own life and family until the story was finished; but the result was that her character was just a mess.

What I liked about the film was what seemed to be a much more honest and realistic portrayal of the two prostitutes than we normally see. Both were very believable. Both students, one (Anaïs Demoustier as Charlotte) in control of what she was doing, and the other (Joanna Kulig as Alicja) drinking to much and seemingly headed for disaster. Both of them liked sex; Charlotte liked the sex she had with her customers apparently just as much as she liked the sex she had with her boyfriend. You don't see that in Hollywood movies. In Hollywood movies the prostitutes never kiss and they never have orgasms, and they all hate what they're doing. In this film, Charlotte didn't hate it at all, in fact she liked it a lot; whereas Joanna said that she liked it, and seemed to like the physical sensations, but also seemed to hate the idea of what she was doing. That seemed pretty realistic to me.

There were two things that struck me particularly. One was quite early on in the film, when Juliette Binoche asked Charlotte why she kept working. The answer was that the money was hard to give up.

The second was from Charlotte again, and again in answer to a question from Juliette. The question was, what was the worst thing about the work, and the answer was having to tell lies all the time.

Both of those things rang pretty true to me.

So what it comes down to is a more realistic portrayal of prostitution than we normally get, but a rather messy movie with a rather messy central character.

In Paris, Elle Magazine's journalist Anne (Juliette Binoche) is assigned to write a four-page article about prostitution. Anne is a middle class mother and housewife that lives a routine life in a comfortable apartment with her husband Patrick (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) and her two sons, the teenager Florent (François Civil) and the boy Stéphane (Pablo Beugnet).

Anne contacts the college students and call-girls Charlotte "Lola" (Anaïs Demoustier) and Alicja (Joanna Kulig) and she interviews them. They tell details of their sexual experience with their clients, most of them married and aged enough to be their fathers, who are seeking kinky sex that they do not do with their wives.

In the beginning, Anne is shocked with the humiliations and perversions that the girls are submitted to keep their lifestyles. But soon she realizes how tedious her life is and she fantasizes sexual encounters with their clients. Further, she changes her opinion and attitude towards the girls that have good time in their lives with their independence. But in the end, she wears the society mask and returns to her routine life with her family.

"Elles" is a sensual and erotic drama with the theme of prostitution that has been already explored in other movies. The greatest difference is Juliette Binoche, who is perfect in the role of a bourgeois woman that lives in conflict with herself and her family after discovering a different world through her contact with young whores. The contrast of their lives is well used in the screenplay that alternates the girls having sex with clients and Juliette Binoche cooking, washing and cleaning at home. Inclusive it seems that this actress burned her hand indeed while cooking.

There are scenes very explicit with the sexy and gorgeous French actress Anaïs Demoustier and Polish actress Joanna Kulig that are exploitation and certainly will unpleased many viewers. Last but not the least, the music score with classic is another plus in this movie. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Elles"