Tag: prostitution

Her Way (Une femme du monde)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Laure Calamy is astounding in Her Way, turning in the rare kind of performance that alters the very texture and feel of a film. Appearing in almost every scene as Marie, a Strasbourg sex worker turning every single trick possible in order to help her son, this is probably the finest acting work I’ve seen at Tallinn Film Festival this year, giving great presence and potency to Cécile Ducrocq’s debut film.

The intimate yet banal nature of prostitution is quickly established in the film’s opening scene, featuring Marie letting a punter into her home, guiding him through his nervousness and giving him oral sex. It cost 45 euros. Her Way constantly reminds you of the transactional nature of the work involved in this way. Treating it as a job like any other, this scene is later paralleled with her having sex with one of her regulars, a pharmacist who also comes weekly to complain about his wife.

France has a complicated relationship with prostitution. While selling your body is not illegal, purchasing sex is, meaning that it is hard for sex workers to set reasonable prices. This causes great pain for Marie, who wants to help her son (Nissim Renard) train to become a chef. Kicked out of state training due to his poor attitude, the only option left is to find €5000 within just a couple of months to get him enrolled in a fancy private school. With little options left in France, she drives daily to a brothel across the German border in Offenburg, working every night in order to make the money in time.

Great care is laid out in explaining just how prostitution works and the ways that women can find themselves being failed through an imperfect system, whether it’s the African women in France being illegally pimped out on the streets or the squabbling between girls in the German brothel. The women share tips — usually aiming for quick and easy guys over rough, older men — and friendships, giving us a great sense of how the industry works from the inside. While there are certain scenes that have a harshness to them, it never feels exploitative, showing the obvious research and care that Ducrocq has put into depicting the industry.

Shot on handheld, but with a good sense of space and blocking, the film often cuts away from scenes in the middle of a confrontation, giving a constantly rising sense of tension. Ducrocq also has a great ability of finding the right time for a montage to move the story along and give it a rush of feeling. At the centre of all this is Calamy, playing an imperfect, tempestuous, stubborn and passionate woman with the kind of nuance rarely seen in adult (in both senses of the word) dramas. While I had some squabbles with the final third — a tightly-walked deliberate line between traditional plot resolution and more nuanced character work that doesn’t quite come off — it acts as a fine calling card for the debut director and could even be a conversation starter in the Gallic nation.

Her Ways plays in the First Feature Section of the Talinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from the 12-28th November.

Aimless Bullet (Obaltan)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Made and released in the brief period of about a year between the collapse of one dictatorship and the rise of another – and the temporary relaxation of state censorship that accompanied it in South Korea – Aimless Bullet deals with the struggle to survive in that country amidst economic collapse. Men including demobbed soldiers and officers try their hardest to find work, others lucky enough to have jobs struggle to support their extended networks of loved ones while women drift into prostitution – or, if they’re really lucky, become movie stars.

It opens with crippled, former military officer Gyeong-sik, constantly asking Sgt. Park and other drinking buddies not to call him ‘The Commander’, making a scene in a bar and smashing a glass door. Wandering through the streets at night alone afterwards, he’s accosted by former girlfriend Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) who desperately wants him to fulfil his promise and marry her, but he won’t because as a cripple he feel an incomplete man.

Myeong-suk meanwhile is prostituting herself to get by. One of her brothers Song Yeong-ho (Choi Mu-ryong) is determined to find work and looks to have struck lucky when ascendant movie actress Miss Goh gets him a starring part in a film. But when he learns that it’s about a soldier with wounds just like his, he turns the part down. He can’t afford to by his niece Hye-ok the new pair of shoes he’s repeatedly promised her and the little girl has become accustomed to think of him as a liar. Things seem to be looking up when he meets Oh Seol-hui, formerly a woman lieutenant in the army, but their blossoming romance is cut short by tragic circumstances beyond their control their control. Frustrated, he decides to rob a bank – but then that goes wrong too.

His brother Song Cheol-ho (Kim Jin-kyu) suffers from toothache but is loathe to spend the money to get it fixed. As well as his daughter Hye-ok he has a son who bunks off school to make money selling newspapers. His wife (Moon Jeong-suk, star of A Woman Judge) is pregnant. He’s ground down by the daily drudge of working at Kim Seong-guk’s Accounting Office.

As the Commander and the woman lieutenant drop out of the plot to enable the narrative to focus on the two brothers, it lurches towards something like A Day Off, part crime thriller and part noir angst in a world where any promise of a better life always has another, less pleasant side to it.

Perhaps this is best represented by the scene where, like those of the confused heroine of Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) Cheol-ho’s feet walk the streets. His eyes pass shopfronts filled with consumer products he can’t afford before he succumbs to visiting a dentist and paying for a tooth extraction. Even then, he’s told he can only have one wisdom tooth removed per visit, so even that proves less than satisfactory. He slumps into a taxi but keeps changing his mind as to where he wants to go. He has become, as he describes himself, an aimless bullet. The film, by way of contrast, knows exactly what it’s aiming at and in its final scenes hits its target – that of showing the human cost of economic depression – head on.

The film is also known as The Stray Bullet, although given the script’s content Aimless Bullet seems a more apposite translation.

Aimless Bullet plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Wednesday, November 13th, 18.30, Picturehouse Central, London – book here.

Monday, November 18th, 20.20, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 13.15, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the Festival trailer below:

Height Of The Wave (Pa-go)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A small island community where everyone knows everybody else. When she was a kid, Yae-eun’s parents were washed away by a wave some 15 feet high. Somehow she remained in the boat, survived and was adopted by a local fisherman (Park Jung-bum himself). However, she is understandably terrified of going anywhere near water or boats. When a new maritime police chief Nam Yeon-su (Lee Seung-yeon) arrives on the island, her daughter Song-yi (Choi Eun-seo) bonds with Yae-eun (Lee Yeon). Both mother and daughter are initially unaware that the island harbours a dark secret around the orphaned girl.

The new chief, feeling her way around, hears of problems with attacks by wild boar. We don’t see much evidence of this beyond one attacked calf carcass and a sequence in which one of the locals guides the police chief out of an area where the beasts are likely to attack. Between them they carry a sheet as, the local reckons, it’ll fool the boars with their poor eyesight into believing there’s a much larger creature there than them.

Chief Nam becomes concerned for Yae-eun who seems to disappear with boys at every opportunity and is overheard to say things like, “it’ll cost you a hundred” and “you still haven’t paid for last time”. There are a mere four young people on the island. They all live in close quarters and there isn’t much there to amuse them.

This is described as a mystery, but to be honest the script telegraphs what’s going on so early and so loud and clear that it doesn’t really work as such. Park was here working on a script by another writer which perhaps explains the overall lack of gritty visuals and the irritating tendency of the film to tell not show its information. Also, the project was originally intended for TV before being later expanded into the theatrical version shown here.

It’s rather more effective on the level of character study of not only the cop but also her daughter and the orphaned girl she befriends and her mum is investigating. There are also a couple of terrific sequences, one involving a teenager with a gun and, almost at the very end, another with Song-yi wading into the sea to encourage Yae-eun to follow her and overcome her fear of water.

Overall, though, this isn’t a patch on Park Jung-bum’s two earlier features which he also wrote himself with no impetus from television. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a minor blip on an hitherto promising career.

Height Of The Wave plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Bloodline (Hyeol-maek)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Widower of some three years standing Kim An-dong (Kim Seung-ho) has done alright for himself in the mining business in Hokkaido, but now it’s after the Second World War, the occupying Japanese have been thrown out of Korea and he’s come back to Seoul where he lives with his grown up son Kim Geo-buk (Shin Seong-il, the lead in A Day Off, Lee Man-hee, 1968, and a huge Korean star).

The Kims are one of three families in a ramshackle set of basic houses sharing a courtyard. Ggangtong (Choi Nam-hyun) lives with his wife Ongmae (Hwang Jung-seun) and daughter Bok-sun (Um Aing-ran) to whom Geo-buk has taken a shine. Ggangtong’s first wife having died, Ongmae is the girl’s stepmother and is teaching her to sing bar songs so she can make herself and the girl’s father a lot of money via prostitution. The girl is understandably upset about this and instead goes out with Geo-buk to sell socks to soldiers at the nearby U.S. Army base where his dad, seeing the Americans as the most secure source of income in the area, wants him to get a job. Sitting by the railway at night, the young couple talk about getting work in the textile factory at Yeongdeungpo as a possible route out of their economic troubles.

The third family comprises two brothers, one married, one unmarried. The older Won-pal (Shin Young-kyun) makes a meagre living out of scavenging bomb parts left over from the war. His wife (Lee Kyoung-hee), meanwhile, is extremely ill but Won-pal has no money to pay any doctor to even examine her, let alone find a cure, so she lies on the floor all day, barely moving. There’s a suggestion that the physical disabilities of both his wife and young daughter (Lee Gyeong-rim) have been caused by his ill-judged attempts to make money.

Won-pal‘s younger brother Won-chil (Choi Moo-ryong) went to university in Japan and has come back with the desire to write novels, “as if that’s going to put anything on the table”, as his infuriated older brother comments. When Won-chil is around, the pair seem to argue constantly. Their mother (Song Mi-nam) takes refuge in singing Christian hymns, citing Jesus’ words about “in my father’s house are many mansions” – pretty ironic given the family’s cramped housing conditions. If any other members of the family share her faith, they don’t show it.

Won-chil has been trying to find paying work – but nothing has come of it. He’s also having problems with the girl he likes, Ok-hui (Kim Ji-mee). To survive, she is having a relationship with an American soldier since the G.I.s seem to be the only people around with a decent income. Meanwhile, one Madam Hwasan interests An-dong in buying from her a 29 year old potential bride, a refugee who has come down from the North (where the Chinese communists are in power). The economy is on its knees and the sex trade in its various forms seems to be one of the few areas that’s flourishing economically.

There is a bright light on the horizon, however, in that the young couple eventually get jobs at the textile factory and are seen as facing an optimistic future together, so much so that Geo-buk writes to ask both fathers to come and visit them there. It’s as if the film is trying to paint a rosy picture of Korea going forward, particularly through its young, post-war generation. There’s a lot of darkness here, but the country is going to move out of it and everything’s going to be all right. After some of the bleak material earlier, you wonder if the happy ending is just that little bit too pat. Nevertheless as a picture of the immediate post-war period in Korea made about a decade and a half later on, it serves as fascinating viewing today.

The film is also known under the English title Kinship.

Bloodline plays Regent Street Cinema, 03 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Book here. Watch the Festival trailer below:

Love Sonia

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Inseparable rural Indian sisters Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) and Preeti (Riya Sisodiya) work the land with their father Shiva (Adil Hussain). He wishes that his daughters were boys because he thinks that males have greater strength and stamina. Seeing Preeti as not pulling her weight, Shiva sells her to local businessman Baldev Singh (Anupam Kher) for employment in Mumbai. Horrified at her beloved sister’s disappearance, Sonia sneaks off to the local businessman and offers to work in Mumbai so she can be close to her sister.

Singh’s trusted associate Anjali (Sai Tamhankar) takes Sonia across the country by bus. Sonia’s enthralment at Mumbai’s bustling metropolis soon gives way to horror as she discovers what her work entails: she’s locked in a brothel with no obvious way out. Worse still, her sister is nowhere to be seen.

Thrown in with the more experienced and cynical Rashmi (Freida Pinto), Sonia is manipulated by brothel manager Faizal (Manoj Bajpayee) who talks with her as if he had her and all the other girls’ best interests at heart but elsewhere is shown on his mobile touting her as an innocent village virgin.

For its final 20 minutes, the narrative goes international with Sonia and Rashmi transported by computer-trackable shipping container to first Hong Kong where her hymen is resealed by Chinese medics, then L.A. where she services a wealthy client (Mark Duplass).

The opening countryside sequences impress, not only for showing very effectively the two young girls’ carefree, sisterly innocence and the very sweet boy from school who wants to be Sonia’s boyfriend and hold her hand but also for its quite chilling sexist undercurrents. Girls are perceived to be less physically able, so they’re less valued. Simple as that. And as the film progresses, at least until it leaves India, this feeling that women are worth less than men permeates everything.

Even Anjali, the woman who pretends to be kindly and helpful even as she’s transporting Sonia towards brothel incarceration in Mumbai, is trapped by a system that favours men over women. A survivor who’s taken matters into her own hands and doing alright out of it, Anjali has been reduced to betraying her fellow women.

Staying overnight in a hotel en route to Mumbai with Anjali, Sonia is warned by the hotel owner (Ankur Vikal), who clearly has more respect for women than do most of his fellow countrymen, to get away from that poisonous woman. And in Sonia’s brief escape attempt from the Mumbai brothel – before being caught and returned to Faizal’s establishment by the (male) police – a small boy (Sunny Pawar) on a market stall cheerfully describes her as a “Bang-Bang” with crude, expressive hand gestures to match.

The most harrowing scene is Sonia’s accompanied entry into the brothel – the locking of a grille at the entrance after she’s gone inside, the walks down lengthy corridors, the brief glimpses of thrusting male buttocks atop prostrate female bodies revealing exactly the sort of work into which Priiti has been sold. Thereafter, however, the focus is on the psychological manipulation of Sonia by her captors and while this is conveyed very well, you can’t help but feel the film makers have gone out of their way to keep further sexually explicit content to a minimum after this sole, highly effective, almost no holds barred scene.

On the one hand, that may not only allow the film to be watched by viewers who might otherwise find it too harrowing but also spare the actors and actors from portraying acts of a sexual nature which perhaps they shouldn’t be asked to perform. On the other, it perhaps overly sanitises Sonia’s experience, reducing her trauma’s potential power. That said, a couple of sex scenes involve Sonia, including a pretty unpleasant rape, albeit fairly discretely filmed.

Seeming brothel client Manish (Rajkummar Rao) tells Sonia he works for a charity that rescues girls tricked into prostitution. His later attempt to rescue her fails when she won’t come out, possibly because of Stockholm Syndrome, and the police quickly usher him off the premises with the one girl he’s already rescued. This incident makes her captors move Sonia to Hong Kong so she can’t be traced. Hollywood’s Demi Moore later turns up as an anti-sex trafficking charity worker in L.A.

The exposé of enforced prostitution and international sex trafficking, a form of slavery, is to be welcomed, as is the timely portray of widespread Indian male prejudice against women. For this writer, though, Love Sonia would have been more effective still had it not tried to tone down its physical, sexual content. But it’s still worth seeing.

The UK premiere of Love Sonia is on January 23rd at Curzon Bloomsbury – book here.

Love Sonia is out in the UK on Friday, January 25th. Watch the film trailer below: