Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls might be
one of the finest-ever studies of a workplace, regardless that the work in
question is prostitution, sold out of a discreetly upscale apartment; in just
an hour and a half, it encompasses an astounding range of incident and
interaction and attitude, facilitating an improbably complete sense of the establishment
as a multi-faceted meeting place and as economic matrix. It convincingly
captures the mundane rhythms and rituals of the place: the different practices that
kick in when the boss isn’t around, lunch orders, runs to the pharmacy, breaking
in of new recruits, requests to stay late; all as naturalistically textured as
if Borden had been observing it all her life. The women are convincingly diverse
in their race, motivations, attitudes toward the job (some hide it from their
significant others, some don’t; some use their real names, some don’t), where
they draw the line with the clients; the clients in turn range from needy (there
are frequent requests to meet the women outside, based in a belief that these
are real connections, held back by the artificiality of the setting) to entitled
to entirely businesslike. The film is explicit about the job’s physical
requirements, meticulous in tracking the money (the central character Molly enters
everything in a little book, depositing her takings on the way home); it’s
often funny in the way that workplaces usually are, and of course deadly
serious. While Borden’s style is generally intimately naturalistic, the scenes
between the women and clients are sometimes consciously posed, coaxing us to
view those encounters as structural constructs, and to interrogate our own gaze
on them. Her amazing film ends as it began, in the midst of domestic
intimacy, establishing all that we’ve seen as a common extension of that state,
and uncomfortably sharing many of its attributes.
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