Sex work has been a staple topic of cinema practically since the invention of the medium, and French cinema has contributed to that corpus as much, if not more, than any other film-making nation. You might even say it’s helped to forge some of the great cinematic cliches about prostitution, going as far back as Sarah Bernhardt’s turn, adapted from a stage production, as a courtesan-with-a-heart in a 1912 adaptation of Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias.
French director Cécile Ducrocq takes some of those cliches and shreds them with her perceptive, humane film, a feature debut that’s at least partly inspired by her award-winning 2014 short Back Alley. As in the latter, Laure Calamy (best known outside France for playing lovelorn personal assistant Noémie in Call My Agent!) plays Marie, a self-described “pute” of a certain age somewhere on the other side of 35. Marie walks the streets and sees a slowly dwindling roster of regular clients, but she’s largely unashamed of her line of work, to the point that she can nonchalantly tell a bank manager that’s what she does for a living and he doesn’t even bat an eye. She’s actively involved in a sex workers’ political movement to change the law so that clients can’t get away with paying too little for their services.
But her teenage son Adrien (Nissim Renard), who also knows she does sex work, is at that critical age where he needs to get a job or a college place if he’s to achieve his dream of becoming a chef. The problem is he’s in with a rum lot of peers, is doing too many drugs and has already been expelled from a state-paid course. To keep his place at a private school, Marie has to raise 5,000 euros in just a few months, which means giving up her self-employed independence to work at a club.
It sometimes feels like Ducrocq didn’t quite trust that viewers would be fascinated enough by the credible, deeply plausible portrait of the milieu itself so she throws in a moral dilemma or two to up the stakes. That adds some drama but it’s not really that necessary given how mesmeric Calamy is just living in the role. But Calamy gets to show off her astonishing dynamic range as an actor, adept at comedy, anxiety, maternal rage and kittenish coquetry, all in the space of a single scene.
• Her Way is released on 26 August in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
