This was a complete waste of eventually useful ideas. I enjoy a filmmaker who tries to get out of the preconceived canons and ways to tell a story. Nowadays, the best cinematic essays one can find is on how to reformulate narrative devices and story telling, and in a second plan, visual renewed ideas. If the eye narrative is in conformity with the storytelling device, that's when we have great films.
Here we have a work by someone who probably agrees with what i told above, but, at least in this try (second try, according to IMDb) was completely clumsy, useless, bad tasted. This is a terrible work, it pretended much, it tried to do things in an imaginative way, but the final work is a disaster, originated, i believe, in the lack of sensitivity of who worked this.
So, we're being told a fictionalized narrative, multi layered. This means we have a great number of threads to follow (here associated with different prostitutes). The device used is the false documentary. In the middle of that assumed fakery, we have a fiction line, with Richards, Hannah and Almeida.The problem is how rigidly this construction is made, and how little imaginative it becomes in its development. I mean, the actresses playing prostitutes (i really suppose they were all actresses, i just had a doubt on one or two) are a complete cliché, someone sit down and thought "how many kinds of prostitutes, and prostitution motivations, and prostitutes social conditions ca i think of?". And that's it. We have the African black nymphomaniac, we have the Brazilian hot "sexual available" lookalike prostitute, we have the Latin American Indian descendant prostitute, we have the high class escort (who is french!), we have the male prostitute. We have those who like what they do, those who do it for money, and those who don't have other choice. So useless, so superficial, so boring, such a waste of time. There are such great examples on fake documentaries about half real realities ('F for Fake' being at the top of this list) that it is terrible that someone could do this like we see here. What's the point of portraying people that look like prostitutes, talk like several stereotypes of prostitution would talk, act like prostitutes, live like prostitutes, but are in fact actors? The question is: why not place real prostitutes and make a real documentary if there is no manipulation, no intention at all behind the fake documentary?
Than, to conclude, the fiction story. An anthropology student, virgin, who is studying prostitution. Her neighbour is a prostitute and due to financial trouble, she comes to enter the job as well. What was the point? In the end, this developed as those common documentaries made for TV channels, History, Biography, Odisseia, etc. With an exception: with those documentaries, one can at least take valuable facts, if you don't know them, and if you like being distracted (i don't) you can rely on the awful fictional bits.
The visual resolution of this is made in accordance to the uselessness of the story choices. Most of the way we have women detached from whatever the environment was where they were speaking, and pasted above the photograph of a cheap hotel where prostitution happens. Other times we have useless visual tricks, of deforming images, and highly saturated colours.
My opinion: 1/5 avoid it.
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