Her Way review – French prostitution drama is insightful but goes nowhere
A refreshingly non-judgemental and business-focused look at sex work is let down by a dull plot and irritating characters
Most films about sex work find their bleakness in the day to day violence and threat of the work itself, but Cecile Ducrocq’s Her Way takes a different approach. Clearly deeply researched, it instead concerns itself with the grim business realities of the industry, finding its single most shocking moment in a scene in which our heroine, 39-year-old prostitute Marie (Laure Calamy), reveals that she brings in less than €20,000 a year. It’s a stinging insight into an already depressing milieu, one that is brought to life with great attention to detail before being let down by a sluggish and repetitive plot.
Marie needs the money to fund a placement at a private culinary academy for her sullen but talented teenage son Adrien (Nissim Renard), who has been expelled from the state-funded schools around them in Strasbourg. It’s a quest that takes Marie away from her comfort zone as a fiercely independent escort and across the border into a German brothel, and Calamy plays Marie’s constant self-suppression of her own pride well, trying her best not to let frustration boil over.
It’s at the eventual breaking points that Her Way collapses, though, as Marie and Adrien get into endless screaming matches about his lack of discipline and direction. So much of Her Way’s runtime is spent in scenes like this, two often unlikeable characters endlessly yelling at each other, that you’re left exhausted well before the credits roll. Adrien in particular is such a generically shitty teen that he feels at odds with an otherwise meticulously constructed world, and the film as a whole gives a weirdly lenient pass to Marie’s obvious racism whenever she encounters Black sex workers.
It all adds up to a film much more interesting on paper than in practice, unable to balance the clear-eyed and pragmatic look at its protagonist’s profession with a far more melodramatic story that never really ends up going anywhere. There’s maybe a compelling and focused short film here if it were to dial in more exclusively to the scenes of Marie’s militant pro-prostitute activism but, as a feature, Her Way becomes an irritating slog.
Her Way is released in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 26 August.
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