Student Services

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.

This French movie is based on a supposedly autobiographical story about a young and incredibly naive university student (Deborah Francois) who has to resort to prostitution to pay for her studies. This movie certainly doesn't glamorize prostitution from the female perspective as the girl's johns are presented as decidedly unattractive, pathetic, and borderline dangerous. It kind of DOES, however, tend to glamorize prostitution from the male perspective as Deborah Francois ("The Page Turner", "Female Agents") is very attractive and spends half the movie in various stages of undress. Moreover, she is (often pretty unbelievably) sweet and naive and probably nowhere near as cynical and hard-bitten as the kind of person who would be working as a prostitute in real-life. I'm sure most of the potential male audience of this movie can't honestly say they are watching this purely out of social concern that gorgeous but financially strapped French co-eds might be turning to prostitution (at least I know I can't).

There's always a danger in a film that, on one hand, is this sexually explicit, but is also, on the other hand, trying to generally condemn the sex trade. They've actually made a few films like this in America recently. "About Cherry" (with another unbelievably gorgeous model/actress, Ashley Hinshaw) runs into the same problems as this one. But both are vastly preferable to "On the Doll" where the decidedly PG-13 content manages to add to an already ridiculous and laughably unbelievable "expose" content. Only the obscure recent American indie film "Smile Pretty" successfully manages to be bold enough to tackle this kind of touchy subject without being so explicit as to slip into exploitation itself.

I certainly DON'T want to take anything away from Francoise, however, who is quite good in this (and it's certainly not HER fault she's far more naturally beautiful than any real prostitute probably would be). I don't know is she speaks English well, but if so she certain has the talent to compete with most young Hollywood actresses (who would never be brave enough to tackle a sordid role like this). She could be the next Marion Cotillard (who tackled a number of French films like this before becoming a rising star in Hollywood), or at least the next Ludivine Sagnier (a big star in France who has occasionally been successful outside it). She is definitely one to watch.

Deborah Francois I must say, is one of the sexiest girls to get her gear off. Her sexy and magical presence is worth the view alone. SS is an enjoyable film, for that fact, but we've been around this course, many a stories before (Slovenian Girl, 2010's Girls, or loosely the Aussie offbeat Sleeping Beauty- 2011). This is a tasty film which really works with, or relies on the scenes with uni hottie Laura, (Francois) making ends meat, by becoming a private escort and companion, through the internet, with a middle aged, enigmatic and menacing regular, Joe. The more demanding or weird he gets, the more dangerous aura we feel around the guy, where we fatally see a path for Laura that won't end well here. He pays her good, but they come with a price. He has some sick tastes, none more than an orgy scene with some dirty repulsive types, near the end, he sets up. At first Laura, thinks the service will just be a one off, but like a candy to a baby, she's get sucked into this business, which has us pondering, does she keep doing it, cause she enjoys it, or is purely for the money. The answer is both, she just doesn't want to admit she enjoys it. In short bits, we see her service other men, one a corpulent, background middle aged guy, where they share a slow moving dance, that scene kind of becomes humorous. One scene earlier in, has a client who picked her up at a bar, get dangerous. But really the film focuses on Laura and Joe's interludes. I mean does she like this guy, or seek a kind of friendship from him. The film doesn't really cut deeper than that, where honestly, I preferred a darker ending instead of the unsatisfying one I got here which really slumped. Seeing Francois in the raw, is one hell of a privilege, and she stokes up the screen. Here's another of these foreign flicks, with frank nudity, some of them dangerous, push bounds scenes, and if you're in the mood for a tasty dirty foreign flick, SS like 2004's Greek title, Hardcore will satisfy sexual hungry appetites.

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.

Laura is a complex character: She wants to earn money and she doesn't feel guilty to offer sex. However, she doesn't really enjoy the moments with their clients, especially with whom she doesn't like. From the moment she is being ripped off (i.e. Clients fail to pay, clients force her to perform some sexual acts she doesn't want), she is somehow regretful about doing it. In the final scene where she takes off her glasses and wig then smiles, showing who she really is. She is kinda showing us that she is glad she is no longer a sex worker, and she didn't make a bad choice to be a sex worker. She didn't choose to run away, instead, she embraces it and lives with it.

Perhaps if she wasn't a sex worker in the first place, she would't discover who her bf really was and how amazing her life would be without him. Study, work, and life. Husbands, boyfriends, they might just haul you somehow. Perhaps if she didn't choose to come to Paris after the bad experiences while being a sex worker, she would't recover it from her nightmare. Everything happens when it is supposed to.