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.
