Yo puta

Many things could be said about this film - misleading, clichéd, style over substance, but in the end the most important aspect plays the decisive role: this film is boring.

The authors decided to present the film as a pseudo-documentary, but instead the viewer is subjected to seeing poorly acted commentary dialogue about prostitution over and over again. Maybe that would be interesting if the commentary itself had at least a spark of originality, alas... Person after person, every participant in this unwatchable boring mess says nothing but stereotypical b.s. It is almost as if the filmmakers made their product for someone from Mars - someone who has never seen or even heard of a prostitute in their entire life!

Oh, there is also Denise Richards in this movie. Yes. We all know that Denise Richards adds credibility to any movie! Seriously though, Richards and Daryl Hannah are in this film, but why they are here is anyone's guess. Their scenes could be easily taken out - they are not important. Well, in fact, the whole film is not important - just skip it altogether and watch something else.

Yo Puta is interesting in the sense that it uses the documentary format (it's not a documentary - it just looks like one). Interspersed with various interviews of whores is a lame storyline populated by Daryl Hannah and Denise Richard's characters.

Yo Puta is probably most enlightening to people who have no idea of the difference between a streetwalker and a private escort, or a gigolo and a whore. Thematically, it offers a clichéd view of the world's oldest profession, and offers nothing new to the audience.

There is no emotional engagement with the purported whores. And their stripped-in backgrounds (mostly hotel rooms or other cheesy places) is distracting to say the least. Denise Richards and Daryl Hannah do little to save the anemic movie, mostly because their script is almost non-descript, predictable and totally lacks any concept of tension.

You won't miss a thing if you skip this movie. Actually, almost anything you do will be a better use of your time.

A writer is interviewing prostitutes, porn stars and gigolos for her latest book. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the scholarship of the student of PHD of anthropology Rebecca (Denise Richards) finishes and she has financial problem to keep her apartment. Her neighbor and call-girl Adrianna (Daryl Hannah) introduces her to prostitution.

"Yo Puta" is a weird and pointless movie that explores the underworld of sex through interviews. In 1991, the sexy Theresa Russell filmed the good Ken Russell's "Whore" talking to the camera in a pseudo-documentary style, and the result was an original movie. Unfortunately "Yo Puta" wastes interesting information in a dull screenplay. I have recently watched "Lilja 4-Ever", "Anjos do Sol" and "Human Trafficking", and all these movies are related to the contemporary slavery of the traffic of women. "In Yo Puta", this subject is approached and lost in the shallow screenplay. The story of Rebecca and Adrianna is awful and ridiculous. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Garotas de Programa" ("Call-Girls")

Many of the previous comments were close-minded. I haven't seen this film in several months, but it's ingrained in my mind. "The Life" was not about supporting prostitution, but more about the reasons/situations that lead to and exist, in such a "profession" world-wide. The element of documentary and fiction was a different take on the subject. If the fictional part of the story was just as candid and raw as the documentary portion, then the film would've been better. The subtitles were somewhat distracting due to speed. But overall, the film accomplished it's task. The theme holds, "Prostitution shouldn't be glorified, but accepted as reality. Knowing reality illuminates the real world."-shav

This was a complete waste of eventually useful ideas. I enjoy a filmmaker who tries to get out of the preconceived canons and ways to tell a story. Nowadays, the best cinematic essays one can find is on how to reformulate narrative devices and story telling, and in a second plan, visual renewed ideas. If the eye narrative is in conformity with the storytelling device, that's when we have great films.

Here we have a work by someone who probably agrees with what i told above, but, at least in this try (second try, according to IMDb) was completely clumsy, useless, bad tasted. This is a terrible work, it pretended much, it tried to do things in an imaginative way, but the final work is a disaster, originated, i believe, in the lack of sensitivity of who worked this.

So, we're being told a fictionalized narrative, multi layered. This means we have a great number of threads to follow (here associated with different prostitutes). The device used is the false documentary. In the middle of that assumed fakery, we have a fiction line, with Richards, Hannah and Almeida.The problem is how rigidly this construction is made, and how little imaginative it becomes in its development. I mean, the actresses playing prostitutes (i really suppose they were all actresses, i just had a doubt on one or two) are a complete cliché, someone sit down and thought "how many kinds of prostitutes, and prostitution motivations, and prostitutes social conditions ca i think of?". And that's it. We have the African black nymphomaniac, we have the Brazilian hot "sexual available" lookalike prostitute, we have the Latin American Indian descendant prostitute, we have the high class escort (who is french!), we have the male prostitute. We have those who like what they do, those who do it for money, and those who don't have other choice. So useless, so superficial, so boring, such a waste of time. There are such great examples on fake documentaries about half real realities ('F for Fake' being at the top of this list) that it is terrible that someone could do this like we see here. What's the point of portraying people that look like prostitutes, talk like several stereotypes of prostitution would talk, act like prostitutes, live like prostitutes, but are in fact actors? The question is: why not place real prostitutes and make a real documentary if there is no manipulation, no intention at all behind the fake documentary?

Than, to conclude, the fiction story. An anthropology student, virgin, who is studying prostitution. Her neighbour is a prostitute and due to financial trouble, she comes to enter the job as well. What was the point? In the end, this developed as those common documentaries made for TV channels, History, Biography, Odisseia, etc. With an exception: with those documentaries, one can at least take valuable facts, if you don't know them, and if you like being distracted (i don't) you can rely on the awful fictional bits.

The visual resolution of this is made in accordance to the uselessness of the story choices. Most of the way we have women detached from whatever the environment was where they were speaking, and pasted above the photograph of a cheap hotel where prostitution happens. Other times we have useless visual tricks, of deforming images, and highly saturated colours.

My opinion: 1/5 avoid it.

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