Elles

C- sex drama

• Wrtten by Malgorzata Szumowska and Tine Byrckel
• Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska

Let’s get the expectations raised by this French/Polish co-production’s NC-17 rating out of the way first. Yes, there is a lot of sex, and a lot of nudity (both male and female). And no, I didn’t find anything in Elles to be erotic.

Which is odd, because the film stars Juliette Binoche, who could be erotic cleaning a cat box.

In this self-important yet shallow drama, she plays Anne, a freelance journalist and apparently full-time housewife. While her husband is away at work and her two son in school, she spends her time cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and interviewing two young college students moonlighting as prostitutes (Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig).

She’s working on an article about these young women–why and how they started selling their bodies, how they feel about it, what it’s like to lie to everyone close to them. The film also shows them with their various clients in scenes that stop just short of hardcore. Until quite late in the picture, we’re not sure whether these sex scenes are flashbacks, cross-cutting, or Anne’s fantasies, sparked by the the stories that the prostitutes tell her.

And if there’s anything Anne needs to escape into, it’s fantasy. Her teenage son smokes pot, skips school, and rebels against everything. Her younger son is addicted to video games. Her relationship with her husband is in serious trouble, although the filmmakers never bother to tell us the nature of their problems.

That’s the film’s biggest problem: We never really get to know who Anne is and what’s eating her inside. She’s clearly suffering from depression. Whenever she’s home, she mopes around looking glum. She occasionally takes a masturbation break, but that doesn’t cheer her up much. She just looks sad as she cleans rooms, fights with kitchen gadgets, cooks a dinner for guests she doesn’t like, and wanders around their large, luxurious Paris flat. (Her husband’s job must be quite lucrative. I can tell you from personal experience that freelance journalists don’t make that kind of money.)

She only comes alive when she’s with the prostitutes. She clearly enjoys being with these young women, and hearing about their sex lives. They become her friends–apparently her only friends.

The movie itself comes alive only with one of the prostitutes–the one played by Demoustier. She’s upbeat and  seems to genuinely enjoy getting paid for sex, but the lying involved is getting to her. She has a boyfriend, and he thinks she works in a fast food joint. You know that relationship is headed for a disaster. She also has some interesting johns, including one begins a little foreplay and then starts crying.

Elles would have been a better film if it had stuck to that character. As Anne, Binoche does her best, which is always excellent. But director/co-writer Szumowska didn’t give us enough information about her to make Binoche’s performance work. She’s a brilliant actor, but here she’s trying to emote in a vacuum.

Szumowska had an interesting idea, a great cast, and the willingness to embrace explicit sexuality. Too bad she didn’t make a good film.