Fucking Alone
Malgoska Szumowska takes part in the Berlinale Panorama with ELLES, asking questions about the true nature of sexual encounters.
Malgoska Szumowska's ELLES
ELLES begins with a fragment of Gaspar Noé's controversial and explicit short WE FUCK ALONE. ELLES is equally unsettling. The main protagonists of the movie are two young women who became prostitutes in order to pay their studies, rent, and everything else you need to live in a big city. They are not women who ran from abusive parents, poverty or great difficulties back home. They ran away from mediocracy, cheap furniture and their parent's conformism instead. They want to be powerful, educated women – they want what almost every woman wants nowadays.
When they are exercising the profession, however, is not about what they want. Even when they feel they're in control, they're not. It's all about role-playing, where the client wants to feel he's sexually stimulating for the women. "Does this make you wet?" They just want to hear the "yes", not actually please anybody besides themselves. At that point we ask: “Do we fuck alone?" Theoretically the sexual encounter is the moment when you are most intimately connected with someone else. In this movie we see that within the client-prostitute dynamic, they don't stop being alone. He is fucking his frustrations and fantasies, she is fucking the money. They, together, fuck alone.
Despite being a tough subject, one of the biggest achievements of ELLES is showing the other side of this relationship. Not a world of roses, of course, but a relation with some tenderness. Not only based on sexual humiliation and power, but also on the client's search for a maternal comfort, free of judgment.
There's a subtle, penetrating beauty in the slow camera movements that follow the characters quietly in their surroundings, calmly unveiling them. Equally calm is the gradual expansion of Juliette Binoche's character – a successful journalist at Elle magazine, who interviews the two young prostitutes – who starts as a coldish well-dressed workaholic Parisian, and soon becomes a woman of flesh and bones like the girls themselves.
In the relationship between Binoche and the girls, we can see how the interviewer is as exposed in this exchange as the interviewees. To interview is also to be open. And this reverberates inside her. The movie's central catharsis comes from this confrontation, where not only the prostitutes' situation, but all women's situation is at stake. What actually matters? What comes first? Some women sacrifice their relationships, their families, others sacrifice their pride. And some sacrifice themselves.
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