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Of the many working girls and guys who inhabit the Criterion Collection, perhaps the most iconic is Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine in Belle de jour, a chilly housewife who spends her afternoons exploring her repressed sexuality as an employee at a high-priced brothel.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini has boundless compassion for the amazing Anna Magnani’s title character in Mamma Roma. She’s a middle-aged prostitute who tries to leave the life behind and hide her past from her beloved teenage son, only to be confronted by a former pimp.
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In Götz Spielmann’s fate-preoccupied neonoir Revanche, the protagonist wants to whisk the beautiful Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko) away to a better life. But to do so, he ends up using her as a pawn in a misguided criminal endeavor. Tamara is both the film’s central erotic figure and the plot’s tragic catalyst.
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Even minus the narcolepsy, River Phoenix’s lovelorn Mike Waters in My Own Private Idaho would be one of cinema’s most memorable prostitutes, so idealistic and pure is his love for fellow hustler Scott (Keanu Reeves), and so vivid and eloquent is director Gus Van Sant’s expression of his dreamscape.
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Is there a more striking one-scene character than Edra Gale’s Saraghina in Federico Fellini’s 8½? With her eyes made up to resemble a raccoon’s, her tousled black hair, her more-than-ample bosom, and her deliciously lurid rhumba, she’s every pubescent boy’s nightmare and fantasy.
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Harumi, the indefatigable main character in Seijun Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute played ferociously by Yumiko Nogawa, is more than just a “comfort woman” servicing Japanese soldiers on the Manchurian front. She’s a warrior in her own right, fighting to stay alive in a soul-crushing system.
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Delphine Seyrig’s main character in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles entertains men for money in the modest flat she shares with her grown son. But director Chantal Akerman doesn’t show us these encounters, instead focusing with intense gravity on other serious daily matters, such as making meatloaf, breading veal, boiling water, making beds, and writing letters.
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Thanks to Max Ophuls’s luxurious, crane-assisted, swooping long takes, the women of “The Tellier House”—the second of the three Guy de Maupassant adaptations that make up the director’s Le plaisir—are perhaps the most majestically shot bordello dwellers ever put on film. Of course, when you cast Danielle Darrieux as the madam, your results can’t help but be a little regal.
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Prostitution is inseparable from other forms of capitalist commerce in Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, featuring Marina Vlady as Juliette Janson, a married woman who meets clients in the afternoon, between dropping her daughter off at day care and going clothes shopping.
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Kenji Mizoguchi often extended his cinematic sympathies to compromised or fallen women. His last film, the miniature epic Street of Shame, about a brothel in Tokyo’s red-light district, offers a rich ensemble of working women. Soon after the film’s release, prostitution was outlawed in Japan.
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Of the many working girls and guys who inhabit the Criterion Collection, perhaps the most iconic is Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine in Belle de jour, a chilly housewife who spends her afternoons exploring her repressed sexuality as an employee at a high-priced brothel.
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