WORKING GIRLS

France, 2020, 91 minutes, Colour.

Sara Forestier, Noemie Lvovsky, Annabelle Lengronne, Nicolas Cazale, Sergi Lopez.

Directed by Frederic Fonteyne, Anne Paulicevich.

A drama with more than a touch of the documentary.

This film focuses on three women who lead in ordinary life in France but each day across the border into Belgium and work in a brothel. The treatment is direct but also invites the audience to understand the women, their ordinary lives, the pressures on them, the influences on them to take a prostitution. The treatment is far less sympathetic towards the men, the men in the women’s lives, and their clients.

There are very strong performances from the three actresses who portrays the women, from different backgrounds, the narrative giving details of their lives at home, and the transformation when they cross the border and their work.

The film is well summed up in a review in Cineuropa by Aurore Engelin (on the theCineuropa website).

Shored up in photography by the young cinematographer Juliette Van Dormael, the authors capture the truth of this trio’s life, which is full of drama, euphoria, time spent together, hysterical laughter, conflicts, life in its most organic form. It follows their day-to-day at home, as well as in the brothel; time spent waiting and moments of complicity. As we attach ourselves, in turn, to each of these girls’ viewpoints, we understand their flaws and their force, the power which drives them and allows them to overcome the impossible. The focus, here, is showing them in all their dignity, a hard-won dignity which they must endlessly lay claim to, again and again.