Mes chères études

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.

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.

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.

It's one of most important movies I've ever seen. I thought it would be about horny girl, who wants to get some extra money. Trailer, honestly, doesn't put a good picture what this movie is about. On the other hand, maybe it's because it wants to attract average audience to the truth about prostitution and not just people, who feel concerned about different social issues.

I think the film is done really well in meaning it pictures all nuances of prostitution very precisely and realistically without getting too heavy psychologically. It's not a thriller or erotica, it's just a story of life of one girl, who took a decision to try out prostitute services. What's important, she's smart, and sees things not through the lenses of a young naive girl, but someone with in-depth outlook on this job.

I definitely recommend it for everyone, who wishes to know, what prostitutes actually go through.

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.