During my short time at Toronto International Film Festival 2011, I was drawn to the story of student ‘sponsoring’ in Polish director Malgoska Szumowska’s Elles, starring Juliette Binoche.
Parisian upper middle-class journalist Anne (Juliette Binoche) is researching an article for ELLE concerning female students who sell their bodies to pay for their education and a comfortable lifestyle.
For her story, Anne persuades two seemingly self-assured young students – the candid Alicja (Joanna Kulig) and a more discreet Lola, whose real name is Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier) – to speak about their experiences of being ‘sponsored’ through their studies.
The film see Anne preparing a dinner for her husband’s boss, transcribing the interviews for her story and having flashbacks to her time spent with the girls.
At first Anne is emotionally removed and somewhat judgemental of their casual sexual encounters and her feminist sensibilities force her to view their trysts as humiliating and misplaced empowerment. As the story develops, we see Anne empathise with Alicja and Lola and begin to understand their motivations.
There are moments when OCD-prone Anne lets her guard down and gets drunk on vodka and makes a sloppy supper of pasta with Alicja in her apartment. Another is when she gets drawn into Charlotte’s giddy excitement of hearing one of john’s phone messages.
Szumowska and her female co-writer Tine Byrckel have the courage to suggest that the girls feel a slight rush of excitement to know that they’re desired by men, particularly those old enough to be their fathers.
However, it doesn’t gloss over the fact that they were drawn into prostitution through desperation and circumstance. As a new immigrant in Paris, everything goes wrong for Alicja and she can’t fall back on her family or admit defeat. For Charlotte, her family’s poverty and her dead-end job don’t add up to a university education or even enough money to live on.
The deeper Anne gets involved in their lives, she begins to question her own bourgeois lifestyle and her supposedly ‘respectable’ family’s flaws. She has fractured relationships with her emotionally-absent husband, pot-smoking teenage son and PlayStation-addicted younger son. The final scene of the dinner party sees her own personal act of freedom and rebellion, breaking out of her conservative mould.
Alicja and Charlotte’s seemingly breezy sidelines are marred by the shame of Alicja’s mother discovering her profession, Charlotte’s difficulty in keeping her second life a secret and most imporantly, Charlotte’s encounters with brutal sexual abuse.
This is a vital element of the film, as it avoids idealising student prostitution, although one could argue that uptight journalist Anne may temporarily live vicariously through the girls. Indeed, the all-female team are sensitive to this and show the reality that while they are not the stereotypical idea of a prostitute, being pimped or forced into selling their bodies on street corners or brothels, there are still dangerous, damaging consequences.
Elles is sure to divide opinion on student prostitution, but Malgoska Szumowska tackles the subject in a human, non-judgemental way that makes us question just how much exploitation we face in our own lives and what exactly is socially acceptable. Juliette Binoche was made for the role and while it’s not likely to be one of her most critically acclaimed performances, it’s clearly a personal project that has great significance.
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