Directed by Lizzie Borden. Written by Sandra Kay and Lizzie Borden
A lot of professions come down to writing emails on the computer. Think of any white-collar job, and chances are it’s easy to imagine a day in the life. Meetings, small talk, listening in meetings, looking at your calendar, and emails, emails, emails. It doesn’t spark curiosity.
Some jobs do pique our interest. We wonder what that’s like, daydreaming about a look behind the curtain so we can live in someone else’s shoes for a while. This can be for a multitude of reasons. Because the job’s dangerous, shrouded in secrecy, or, in the case of Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls, a little taboo and risqué. If you’re among those with an interest to see what it’s like to be a sex worker, you’re in luck, because, as the title suggests, it chronicles the ins and outs of the world’s oldest profession, and it is thorough.
Featuring a very detailed and transparent look at what life’s like for these women, it’s very much what you’d call an average working day as far as these things go: answering the phone, the tedium of waiting around, the “ceremony” of prepping for every guest with showers, towels, fresh linen and rote instructions, the cleaning up afterwards. Borden emphasizes the “work” of sex work to the utmost degree and the treatment is rooted in the mundane.
Yes, there’s nudity and (suggested) sex acts that are treated with a little more pizzazz, especially in presenting the range of services asked for beyond missionary. Borden portrays these with a sense of comedy, throwing us into seances of naked posing, role play, and blowhard pillow talk. These are mostly just flashes, though. Soon it’s back to envious colleagues, nervous newcomers, and toxic bosses.
It’s so much about stripping the profession of its secrecy that you forget there’s a protagonist. Lousie Smith is Molly, who’s got a neat homelife. A beautiful partner she wakes up next to, her nose buried in her lover’s nape. They have a daughter, and they get ready together like millions of other happy small families. Then she wheels off to work, and spends the day leafing through magazines, navigating workplace politics that feel crushingly familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in an office, and handles pushy, dull, and bad clients in intervals of 30-60 minutes.
All in all, it’s an insightful and honest account of Molly’s working day, detailing the insidious dehumanization of the people in the profession while showing us the very familiar existence these people live outside of their work, be it families, school, periods, fear of growing older, domestic woes, and whatever else fits into life’s untidy closet. At the time, depicting sex workers without sensationalism made Working Girls a radical movie.
While Working Girls excels at world-building, it feels like an empty dollhouse. Smith and her fellow cast members deliver flat performances that resemble the acting their characters put on in bed with their client, and when there’s so much energy invested in the daily ritual and circumstances, there’s less and less of a person to tie your wagon to. Molly’s mulling over whether this is what she wants for herself feels like the B-story, and you wonder if Borden really just wanted to make a documentary, but wasn’t able to find willing subjects and access.
The only real sparkling piece of artifice is David van Tiegham’s 80s art pop score, which Borden deploys in between the sheets. It’s salacious in its own way, distinctly of its time, but you sense how avant garde it feels in this setting frequented by repressed conservative men stealing away from the office.
Earnest and non-judgmental, Borden’s movie offers a sincere inside peek at what could be a shocking subject matter, but her treatment offers both insight and entertainment even if that entertainment is less about the story than the world wherein the story unfolds. The fact that we can look back at Working Girls and find it a little too mundane and straightforward is enough proof that it was a necessary movie upon its release. A brave look in, which is to Borden’s credit.
Mikkel Frederiksen 