
Review by Beatrice On 20-Aug-2023
Broadcast in France in prime time on Canal + and inspired by the book "Mes chères ètudes," it tells the true story of Laura, a 19-year-old university student who wants to become an interpreter and translator with dreams of traveling.
Laura is a poor girl, working in a call center to support her studies, but every week it is more and more difficult, the money is not even enough for her to eat: tuition fees, books, housing.
One evening caught by despair she begins to search the Internet for something that can help her, and a man who is looking for female students promising "exchanges of tenderness" makes her smile.
Thus will begin a whirlwind into prostitution that from the first image of the first meeting, similar to the iconography depicting Teresa D'avila being subjected to torture, will see her suffer a moving detachment from her body in the vicious violence she inflicts upon herself.
Experiences that will never succeed in making her a participant, she will always remain disgusted as she scans the clock to make sure that the sold body's time is about to expire.
The time of this "work" will also expire soon, Laura knows that this period will end.
Through the theme of student prostitution, the director declares that she wanted to return this girl's dizzying and painful experience as realistically as possible, with supreme respect, while at the same time becoming one with her, without voyeurism or glamorous lapses but telling an absolutely realistic and truthful story.
"It was in meeting Laura," Bercot continues, " discovering her true face, that I realized the shock she had gone through, what she is, what she represents, the world she has confronted and all that she has inflicted on herself."
In France, data testify that about 10 percent of female students resign themselves to part-time prostitution, and before doing so, they confront themselves by discussing on forums with other girls.
In Italy the phenomenon is booming even for underage girls and only by seeing this film can we manage to understand what phenomenon we are talking about, a phenomenon that starts from the distorted perception of one's own body that invades identities in an almost irreversible way.
Correct, dry, strong act of witnessing a still unrepresented phenomenon, a film that indelibly tattoos itself, that cannot leave indifferent, that inevitably settles among the images of our experience.
20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice
Emmanuelle Bercot movies
GLI INFEDELI
2012