The screen student-prostitute,a twenty-first-century discourse: Mes chères études (2010),Elles (2011),Jeune et jolie (2013)

L’étudiante-prostituée in the news

First, it is necessary to contextualise the wave of films with the real student-prostitute of universities and her relevance in popular media. (I will continue to use ‘her’ and ‘she’ as I have found no media reference to male student-prostitution.) The political debate surrounding a new law that fines clients up to 1,500 euros made the sex-trade one of the most popular subjects in French journalism in 2013. However, in 2008 prostitution was more frequently part of a university news story. The media sensation began with the highly publicised memoire, Mes chères études written by a former student-prostitute, under the pseudonym Laura D, which disclosed the underground student job in all its realism while concluding with some alarming statistics (Laura D, 2007). One stated that 40,000 students (which is one in 57) are prostitutes. ² The scandalous page-turner quickly became a bestseller, demanding that news sources investigate the veracity of the claims. (Note: it is near impossible to uncover the accurate number of prostitutes, and even more difficult to count those attending university.) Reports on student-prostitution appeared in virtually every French news source in 2009: Le Point, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, L’Express, etc. (see Clouet, 2007; Vigoureux, 2008; 20 Minutes, 2008). L’étudiante-prostitutée quickly became ubiquitous in the news with reporters interviewing anonymous female students who preferred to pay for a room with intercourse rather than by working at McDonalds – fast food is a recurring theme in the news stories and in the films. Most of these pieces include lines and statistics that echo the bestselling memoir in stating the students’ desperation and the prevalence of prostitution at universities.

L’étudiante-prostituée titillated the public with the same language that would draw clientele from an internet ad: youth and sex. But she further fascinated viewers and readers with the tragedy of her student status. That French students were selling sex to pay for university suggested that the students were not properly funded by the state, or by their parents, a by-product of the simultaneous financial crisis. To this extent the student-prostitute news story encapsulated the French economy – and many who were unemployed, working overtime, or in less than ideal conditions, could relate to this compromise. It is not surprising that the journalism blitz surrounding the student-prostitute came to a head in the year following the financial crisis, and diminished greatly after the Occupy movement, ³ since media attention to the university phenomenon marks an evolution in sentiment; the narrative questioned capitalism and its recent failures, and helped to inspire the rage-filled cry against it, the Occupy movement – which was in part organised and attended by student groups. Although student-prostitution continues to inspire filmmakers, the bulk of reports I found on the subject are from 2008–10. As is often the case, narrative cinema followed journalistic interest, and the general public was already familiar with the story of Laura D and the new university job by the time Emmanuelle Bercot’s film version of Mes chères études premiered on Canal+.

An economic crisis

As the first French student-prostitute film, Mes chères études uses a somewhat pedagogical approach, and to this extent the film is faithful to the bestseller from which it was adapted, exposing the impoverished student’s circumstances and dilemma. The film begins in the classroom as Laura (Deborah François) faints from hunger. Laura’s collapse critiques the education system, and in part blames it for Laura’s decision to sell her body, for it is only after seeking and being denied help from student services that Laura investigates the possibility of prostitution online.

This is when numbers, physical on-screen numbers, are introduced to the film’s lexicon. On the right-hand side of the screen in Figure 1, we see the calculations of Laura’s expenses, and the hypothetical amount of earnings, and even the surplus, from prostitution. On the left-hand side we see photos of her immediate needs – text books and groceries – to match the equations. When prostitution adds money to her maths problem, no imagined sexual interaction surfaces. Instead we see a nondescript head-shot of a man who is now just a potential customer. ⁴ Thus the audience witnesses the absence of sex in Laura’s strictly financial motivation. Later numbers appear in a very physical context; in a montage of Laura performing various acts for clients (dusting in a maid’s outfit, intercourse, etc.) prices slide around her body parts, illustrating the completion of body commodification. The non-diegetic computer generation of the prices in numbers, as seen in Figure 2, asks already present questions exterior to the narrative concerning the film’s commercial use of the actress. Is the film similarly commodifying Deborah François’s nude body as her character Laura D commodifies herself for her clients? ⁵ But while Mes chères études contains more nudity than the following student-prostitute films, Elles and Jeune et jolie, this nudity adheres to a financial explanation of the sex-trade. As long as Laura is with a client, her nudity lacks sensuality or eroticism, noticeable in Figure 2. Her smirks and sighs further reveal her disengagement with clients.

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Figure 1.

Mes chères études (2010), Emanuelle Bercot, France.

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Figure 2.

Mes chères études (2010), Emanuelle Bercot, France.

As Laura strays from necessary to mildly extravagant purchases, the student status revitalises a nineteenth-century vision of the prostitute as an excessive spender. ⁶ Thus within the financial explanation/apology for prostitution is a critique of conspicuous consumption. In fact, before Laura meets a client, she Skypes a practising student-prostitute for advice and encouragement. From her online mentor she learns that she will be able to buy an expensive handbag with the money earned, and that if she is observant she will perceive other student-prostitutes by detecting their designer handbags at school. In a montage, we see Laura looking at others’ handbags with interest and curiosity. She then focuses on the bodies and faces of the young women – could they be prostitutes too? Laura’s taste for finery increases with her new income, but the boyfriend that she takes to an expensive restaurant, demeans her by claiming, ‘Tu te prostitues pour les jeans Diesel.’ The brands of handbags (Prada) and jeans (Diesel) highlight the conspicuous consumption of the young women; for it is the brand not the contents of the pockets that signify wealth. Furthermore, Laura enjoys the showmanship of goods that were unattainable by her former self, as well as inaccessible for the vast majority of college students. In this cultural mould, the brands she wears prove her physical value. Therefore the film portrays an economic exchange as described by Marx: Laura places her body as a commodity on the market. After she has exchanged this body for its value (a value that is partly determined by labour), she is able to trade it in the cash nexus for luxury goods. The on-screen arithmetic enhances this Marxist reading, and while the numbers may degrade Laura’s nudity to a price, they also elevate prostitution to a métier, a strategic career that is based on market needs and values.

This is not to say that Mes chères études does not also present the violent risk of such a clandestine profession – there are three ‘financed’ rapes in the film. In an early scene, Joe, her returning client, shows Laura the laptop computer she will receive as payment before sliding it under the bed. He then ties her up with electrical tape and rapes her with a dildo, an act that she clearly protests against. But despite the brutality of the scene, the narrative suggests that the violence Laura endures is part of an economic compromise. For despite Laura’s pain, fear and anxiety, she remembers to grab the computer before leaving the hotel room. Her acceptance of the computer, or gift following Marcel Mauss’s theory (see Mauss, 2012 [1925]), implies that the rape is part of a compulsory exchange. This expensive gift that encourages her student enterprise, then symbolically attaches her to Joe, whom she continues to see after the bondage rape/computer trade, further documents her agreement to physical violence.

Her last transaction gone awry and in part repeats the roots of the contemporary world financial crisis, for it was the ready accessibility of American loans that were never repaid that in large part caused the international collapse of banks. When Laura has at last decided to quit the part-time job, Joe convinces her to meet for an irresistible (1,000 euros) au revoir, resulting in a bondage gang rape at an illicit club. When she is not paid (he promises to pay her at a later date), she madly searches for the money around the room, and later harasses Joe by phone for the payment. In this libidinal economic discourse, the prostitute has too easily credited her clientele with her body commodities, and suffers as a result. In fact the film emphasises this financial injustice and fails to address any long-term physical or mental harm resulting from prostitution or rape. Despite the violence implied in the shots surrounding Laura’s exit from the sex club, the gang rape is portrayed as an unwise business decision, because of the lack of loan repayment. In this way, Laura D begins the film as a student without economic agency, but as a part-time prostitute becomes middle-class, advancing her conspicuous consumption as well as her long-term goals (she finishes her translation degree at the top of her class near the end of the film).

Fantasy

Though the nudity of Mes chères études illustrates a Marxist economic analysis, as well as labour’s accompanying physical degradation, nudity in the following two student-prostitute films, Elles and Jeune et jolie, augments an increasingly erotically charged, voyeuristic realm. ⁷ Further contrasting with Mes chères études’ first-person approach, in Elles we meet and view the student-prostitutes through the eyes of a magazine journalist, Anne (Juliette Binoche). While the journalist is superficially a heterosexual female, we see her excited (masturbating) and inspired sexually by her explicit interviews (she changes her style, and initiates intimate contact with one of prostitute interviewees, and later with her husband). This encourages the audience to perceive student-prostitutes as liberated young women who encourage needed sexual experimentation in the frigid, aging bourgeoisie.

Additionally, if Elles contains one scene in which a student-prostitute is the victim of violent sexual abuse, the film more generally depicts a mutual desire between the student-prostitute and her clientele. (To further highlight sensuality and the division of nudity from violence in Elles, when Charlotte is raped she is nearly fully clothed in a long-sleeved shirt, and jeans that are only partially down.) While the camera maintains a distant approach to sexual exchanges in Mes chères études, the camera in Elles gets closer (excluding the rape sequence), with free moving shots over bodies that eroticise their exchanges. The narrative hints at the emotional entanglement of such physical attraction post-coitus; after an especially deviant session Alicja (Joanna Kulig) giggles with her client as he plays ‘Les Feuilles mortes’ on the guitar, while Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier) is unable to accept kisses from her boyfriend following an especially intense interaction with an attractive young man. Jeune et jolie also hints at the student-prostitute’s mutual pleasure, yet we lack access to the protagonist’s mysterious feelings, a feature of her allure. Isabelle’s shock when her regular older client dies from a heart attack during sex, and her willingness to meet his wife and revisit the hotel room where he died, suggest an emotional attachment. To this extent, both films evoke a client’s ideal: one can purchase physical attraction in addition to sex, but lingering feelings never complicate this financial exchange.

The screen student-prostitute’s increasing desire for her clients cannot be divided from her diminishing financial need. As I previously mentioned, Laura of Mes chères études faints from hunger in the film’s first sequence, and in only one scene from Elles does a prostitute appear desperate after student services refuse her rent money. Although most studies show financial need as the motivating factor for prostitution, ⁸ Jeune et jolie refuses such a common place incentive. The protagonist, Isabelle, is a high school student who lives in a three-bedroom Paris apartment with her bourgeois two-income family, who also own a summer home. Possessing anything she desires, Isabelle saves the cash, not once dipping into the hidden envelope in her cupboard. In this way the student becomes an even more ideal prostitute: she sees her clients for sexual experimentation, not to pay bills. With her decreasing financial needs and diminishing sexual victimisation, the screen student-prostitute becomes more desiring and fantastic. While Mes chères études emphasises the rape to which the student-prostitute agrees in three exchanges, Elles shows this violent perversion only once, in an otherwise favourable portrait of the part-time job. Jeune et jolie never insinuates sexual violence. Although the death of a client frightens Isabelle with its morbidness, it further exemplifies a male fantasy, an ideal death being sex at an advanced age with a woman, jeune et jolie.

In general, Jeune et jolie is the most extreme in Othering and objectifying the student-prostitute, who is now even younger (17). For example, the establishing shot of Jeune et jolie studies Isabelle (Marine Vacth) sunbathing on the beach, through the outline of binoculars – we learn soon after that the spy is Isabelle’s pre-pubescent brother (Figure 3). This first shot inaugurates a visual motif: forbidden access to the teenage girl by intrusive means. In her home, we see her masturbating from her brother’s perspective through a crack in the door, and later her stepfather walks in on her while she is showering. These incidents keep the student-prostitute nude under a policing male gaze that is never returned. The protagonist remains mysterious, as she seldom speaks and is known almost exclusively through the eyes of men.

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Figure 3.

Jeune et jolie (2013), François Ozon, France.

Media

Media is an overt theme in all three films referenced in the titles as well as the plots. However, reading the films as a discourse complicates the obvious to demonstrate an evolution in national media interest and societal impact. If Mes chères études winks at the financial as well as the perceived value of college in the word chères, it also repeats and links itself to the well-known book, marketing itself as the fiction film continuation of a print phenomenon. Two years later, the title of Elles subtracts the scholarly component to focus on the space where the student-prostitute is more popularly known, the magazine. The addition of an ‘s’ makes the commodity subject plural (there are many student-prostitutes, and two in this film), and includes the journalist interviewing them. Similarly the ‘s’ makes the magazine plural, for there are many magazines like Elle running similar stories and interviewing similar subjects. As I previously described, the students in Elles do not only prostitute themselves for money, they desire their clients. The third-person pronoun title works in conjunction with this fantasy, Othering the prostitutes and relegating them to the realm of desire. Jeune et jolie also provides a magazine title to Other and eroticise the female protagonist, and specifically chooses a magazine marketed to adolescents to more specifically indicate and advertise her age. While we do not see Isabelle become a magazine article, both her story and her model appearance seem appropriate fashion magazine material. The title adjectives warrant her objectification by the viewers and the men in the film, and also her decision and ability to market herself, as the words describe her cover-girl quality. To this extent, the press titles paradoxically question and re-inscribe the commodity fetish (so often linked to prostitutes) on which magazines thrive.

The student-prostitute films present the discourse as self-perpetuating: it is a media sensation that proliferates, as non-fiction accounts bleed into fictional films. Furthermore, as the public watches the three films, they witness the media development surrounding this figure of interest. The discourse begins by adapting its founding literary component. However, to update the memoir with the popular journalistic investigation it instigated, Bercot begins and concludes with the protagonist in disguise at a television interview. As the rest of the film is a flashback, the entire film is diegetically an interview. The next film, Elles, depicts the journalistic process as we, with Anne, interview the student-prostitutes. In this manner, the films portray interviews as another aspect of student-prostitution.

Although a media reporter does not interview Isabelle of Jeune et jolie, a detective questions her at the police station, typing her responses as a computer camera films her. Here Isabelle reveals a source of inspiration: a television documentary on student-prostitution that she watched with her family. A flashback shows Isabelle joining her family around the television screen, where she quickly becomes transfixed by the image. In this way, François Ozon suggests Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle, transferring the college student-prostitute seduced by physical needs and luxury desires to the high school student-prostitute seduced by television. As Debord writes, ‘Là où le monde réel se change en simples images, les simples images deviennent des êtres réels, et les motivations efficientes d’un comportement hypnotique’ (Debord, 1967: thesis 18). Isabelle’s tender age subjectively makes her more attractive, but also more easily manipulated, as she blindly follows in the footsteps of the television images. However, Debord and Jeune et jolie do not suggest the viewer is just a blind follower. The television set lies in front of the characters, off-camera (see Figure 4), so that despite the characters’ gaze to centre screen-left, the audience primarily occupies the space of the television. The dialogue between the unseen screen image (the television showing an interview with a student-prostitute) the diegetic reality (Isabelle watching the television) and the audience (who, in relation to the camera, serves as both the television that informs Isabelle and her public), all converge, forming the larger spectacle to which the viewer contributes, each component advancing the student-prostitute discourse. Interviews with student-prostitutes are not the only media influence on Isabelle; we also see her privately indulging in internet porn. This consumption/imitation of porn and student-prostitute interviews implies a reciprocal alienation, an alienation to which we as viewers are also subjected.

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Figure 4.

Jeune et jolie (2013), François Ozon, France.

The national prostitute

In order to understand the rise of the student-prostitute in the French popular imagination, I would like to further contextualise her in the surrounding sex-work debate. While France’s national position is abolitionist, prostitution is still legal and considered a private matter. However, the surrounding institutions, pimping and brothels, are not. Furthermore, as already mentioned, since December 2013, paying a prostitute has been illegal. Nicolas Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior brought new legal attention to prostitution in 2002, tying the subject to his primary interest in immigration, as he then argued before the Senate that 80 per cent of prostitutes in France were aliens from Eastern Europe or sub-Saharan Africa who should be arrested and deported. ⁹ Many abolitionists feel a distinction between forced and ‘free’ prostitutes should not be made, but Sarkozy’s Senate address specifically defines the ‘traditional’ prostitute as ‘un mal nécessaire’ and the recent wave of prostitutes and their pimps as aliens (Sénat de France, 2002). He further identifies these women on the street (again there is not one reference to male prostitution) as unable to speak French and later as ‘de pauvres filles dénudées, au milieu de détraqués sexuels’ (Sénat de France, 2002). While these descriptions voice a national concern with the visibility of prostitution, they equally stress the visibility of poverty and immigration that prostitution embodies.

In consideration of the popularity of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, and the immigration/national identity platform that characterised it, one finds cinema reflecting similar views of prostitution in the following years. One might ask, ‘How does the student-prostitute cinematic discourse reflect such nationalistic debates when the narratives and casts do not?’ But this lack of immigrants, pimps, and street work is precisely why the vision of the student-prostitute has massive appeal: the films evoke a reality in modern educational circumstances and provide a fantasy in which prostitution inadvertently pays for a European woman’s acceptable career. As part of their calling, student sex-workers should be young and very attractive, which adds realism to their movie-star appearance. Furthermore, they are advanced French students (actually one is Polish but fluent in French), who discuss Rimbaud and Proust, proving their status in the imaginary community dictated by French language. They are by nature discreet, not hinting at their part-time work through street walking or scanty clothing, but through expensive apartments and designer handbags. While mobile phones and the internet flavour this new version of the screen prostitute with twenty-first-century technology, her appeal is largely nostalgic, evoking a time when, to quote Sarkozy, prostitution was ‘traditional, classique’ (Sénat de France, 2002) and most notably French. In this way the films primarily and increasingly negate the undesirable (and illegal) associations, acquitting the sex-trade as reasonable and exciting work that is no longer merely for the underclasses.

Nevertheless, if the cinematic student-prostitute promotes a male nationalistic fantasy, she also displays radical innovations on the prostitute type. As Russell Campbell’s research demonstrates, the majority of screen prostitutes are minor characters who are murdered. In a chapter labelled ‘Condemned to death’, he explains the predominance of the sex-worker’s filmic fate:

Yet the imperative of making an ideological point hardly explains the sheer volume of films in which prostitute characters meet an untimely death ….The Condemned to Death scenario is resorted to because it permits the cultural expression of a deeply rooted male hostility towards women. (Campbell, 2005: 361)

Although I have addressed phantasmagorical aspects in French student-prostitute films, and their growing erotic and nationalistic concerns, death has so far not entered into this twenty-first-century phenomenon. Thus the student-prostitute provides an improved destiny for screen prostitutes: they not only live, but continue to pursue – and, in the case of Laura in Mes chères études, finish – an advanced education. (I will not speculate here on whether this indicates a lessening of misogynist hostility.) With some reference to the university, their youth and their Frenchness, the film industry considers the student-prostitute to be worthy of a feature-length film, whereas the poorer, uneducated immigrant prostitute is not.

The student-prostitute chooses this type of work (and is not the victim of a brutal pimp), ¹⁰ as well as choosing her clients and schedule. In this manner she is what Russell Campbell labels a business woman, only performing sex acts with a view to larger career goals. ¹¹ Presenting prostitution as a métier is not incidental, for the concept of prostitution as a profession has been widely debated in France in the twenty-first century. To this extent the l’étudiante-prostituée incorporates the growing French sex-worker movement, and its polemic regarding the recognition of sex-work as a profession. Both sex-work unions Les Putes, founded in 2005, and STRASS (Syndicat du Travail sexuel) in 2009, demand that sex-work be considered a métier while the government follows a mainstream feminist interpretation of prostitution as violence against women. ¹² In fact, to shatter prostitution stereotypes and promote a new vision of the willing prostitute, Fières d’être putes, a manifesto of sorts by two members of STRASS, begins by stating, ‘Non, nous n’avons pas de proxénètes … Non nous n’avons jamais été forces de nous prostituer … Oui nous exerçons un métier stigmatisé’ (Nikitia and Schaffauser, 2007: 4). These are just a few of the many statements made in Fières d’ être putes that coincide with the student-prostitute cinematic discourse to present prostitution as a chosen employment in the twenty-first century.

To this extent, by evoking an autonomous female prostitute, the student-sex-worker film (and the sex-worker movement that doubtlessly inspires and upholds the new genre) reframes an older feminist reading of prostitution. In Luce Irigaray’s Marxist critique, ‘Le marché des femmes’, she argues that women are objects traded among men, and their value derives solely from their ability to be exchanged (Irigaray, 1977). According to Irigaray, women thus remain exterior to any decision made by the exclusively male subjects in the market. If the male client of the student-prostitute film determines the price (he picks, and pays when and if he chooses), the films show a young woman with agency who picks her part-time job (no one else suggests this to her) and collects and spends her own money. In fact she finances her education and designer clothes by letting men borrow rather than trade her. Furthermore, with an increasing depiction of erotic exploration as a professional benefit, the films depict the prostitute as a self-interested entrepreneurial subject, even though her stimulation conversely places her in the realm of male fantasy. Ultimately, in conjunction with currents of French nationalism, the student-prostitute discourse queerly presents sexuality as a fluid commodity that can be marketed to achieve and promote feminine independence.

Epilogue

Here I have traced this twenty-first-century French figure in her emerging stages, but as my analysis of these three films demonstrates, trends and commonalities, notions of media influence, desire, and financial freedom, appear and build chronologically. Therefore, I hypothesise that as students suffer financially, the screen student-prostitute will continue to morph, matching changing French societal fears and fantasies. As I completed this article Kim Chaperon’s Crème de la crème (2014) premiered, which augments the intrinsic entrepreneurship of the student prostitute by inserting a female student-pimp (who works with an otherwise male pimp team). If the sex reversal of the typically male role superficially appears feminist, it troubles the autonomy of the student-prostitute and her unique control over her career and destiny, regressing the screen prostitute to her more common status as a minor character with little or no agency.