Juliette Binoche gives it her considerable all in this otherwise dubious film, which purports to investigate the moral and emotional price of teenage prostitution. Binoche plays a women's magazine journalist working on an article about said subject, which essentially involves long, elaborate conversations with two such student-age sex workers, played by Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig. Both are estimable young actors – Demoustier played the lead in the excellent French indie Living on Love Alone while Kulig appears alongside Ethan Hawke in the upcoming The Woman in the Fifth – but they are poorly served by Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, who has concocted a fable that comes across more like a cable-TV softcore fantasy than a rigorous study of its subject.
Binoche, though, rises above the lubricious material by giving a thoroughly detailed and committed performance as the journalist. She grows increasingly dry-mouthed at the information she hears from her interviewees (some of it acted out in jarringly lurid detail) and, in time-honoured fashion, becomes gradually restive at the sterility of her own marriage and bolshiness of her children. Presumably the idea is to explore the emotional disconnect required to function as one of those can't-be-too-thin French bourgeoises, and Binoche plugs away gamely: fondling shellfish innards, drunkenly bopping, tottering around on ultra-high heels, and at one point, hallucinating that the girls' clients are sitting alongside guests at a dinner party.
I think it's fair to say that Elles has little new to say on the subject; and Szumowska's film looks the other way when it comes to the difficulties of life as a sex-worker. One or two airy empowerment remarks are the extent of the girls' self-investigation and, aside from a couple of arguments and a nasty incident with a wine-bottle, they are allowed a consequence-free route through the film. Flash hotel rooms, crisp white bedlinen, sophisticated and (largely) harmless clients. Szumowska offers a plausible, intimate account of her writer character's life; she doesn't offer anything nearly so forthcoming for the sketchily-imagined prostitutes.
Binoche's unambiguous charisma holds things together on its own; I can't help thinking she's wasting her time.
