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| Louise Smith in Working Girls |
Working Girls puts the emphasis on the "work" in "sex work." All work is alienating in that we do it out of necessity rather than choice. Even the most enjoyable job involves the submission of self to the demands of the boss, the client, and time itself. That alienation is key to Lizzie Borden's deglamorizng of the profession of sex worker. The film's protagonist, Molly (Louise Smith) is a sensible, well-educated (if we take her at her word that she went to Yale) woman who has somehow become a prostitute in a New York City brothel, to which she commutes by bicycle through the city streets. For most of the film she is confined to a windowless apartment -- a feeling of claustrophobia develops through every scene in that setting -- where she services a series of men, feigning interest in them as well as orgasms. The men are ordinary, middle-class, mostly unthreatening business types with a few hangups and predilections. Molly collects her fees and sets aside part of the money for the madam, Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a giddy, vain, but shrewd businesswoman. Molly's downtime is spent chatting and gossiping (usually about Lucy) with the other women who work there, some of them bitter, some naive. The boredom and frustration the women express are much like the ones you'd expect from office workers, schoolteachers, retail clerks, anyone with a job routine: financial problems, relationship issues, resentment of the boss, distaste for some of the regular clients, and so on. It's hard to make a movie about boredom without being boring, but Borden succeeds, if only because of the titillation involved in a movie that focuses on sex. Smith and McElduff give good performances, but some of the other actresses deliver their lines a little woodenly. There's not much in the way of plot, but it's a solid, well-crafted film that feels a little obligatory, as if designed to make a point about sex work and the media's portrayal of it rather than just to tell a good story.
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