Elles

Anne is an established journalist. She is married, has two children, and lives in an elegant Parisian apartment. She is very busy writing an article on student prostitution, so she makes phone arrangements and meets Lola and Alicja, two young college girls. Both demonstrate a great capacity for detachment; they manage to experience a split sexuality, as if their bodies were tools in their hands.

The film skillfully intersects Anne's daily life, interviews, and the girls' actual experiences with their clients.

They state that they have never actually made a decision but that it actually becomes difficult to stop: "you get used to the money," declares Lola.

The clients, the girls recount, are mostly bored husbands, and they consider themselves quite fortunate, given the state of economic degradation from which they would have emerged, and when confronted with Anne's question about the sense of humiliation, it almost seems as if the problem posed is a false one. In reality, "sex is normal," declares Lola, "it's like doing it with your boyfriend."

Anne is more troubled every day by this experience, which leads her to reevaluate her way of life, her relationship with her husband, her children, her profession.

Hers is a sensuality that is mature but fundamentally deadened by the family routine, by a husband she is beginning to see with a different eye. Her confrontation with the two female students confronts her with important questions such as: what is sexuality and what is love; what are actually her opinions and prejudices; what is prostitution and what are compromises; shame and humiliation; motherhood and profession....

The film succeeds in not accusing anyone but relentlessly questioning the meaning and insidious changes in our society. It shows the less pleasant aspects of men and the unfathomability of female sexuality.

The basic question is: If this girls spontaneously experience this reality what makes it unbearable in our eyes? Perhaps the fact that true freedom is choice and our responsibility is that this choice is safeguarded.

Elles has the ability to put the viewer in front of many questions without ever imposing an unambiguous reading, but does so harshly between scenes that do not spare fellatio, pissing, violence and perversion.

It is a marvelous and harrowing journey into the psyche of a woman, the sublime Juliette Binoche, who finds herself facing what Simone De Beauvoir described so egregiously: "woman on a par with man is her own body but her body is a different thing from her."