Her Way: dispassionate portrait of a sex worker

Her Way centres on a sex worker who is desperate, but not in the way you might think. The prolific Laure Calamy brings her usual confident presence and clear-eyed determination to the role of Marie, a self-employed sex worker who is long past conventional worries about whether her job is a good or a bad thing, for herself or others. Although for the sake of convenience she tells most people that she is an at-home hairdresser, she does not hide the truth when it matters – at public protests, with her son Adrien (Nissim Renard) or with her banker. Her despair is of a more normative kind: at 17, Adrien is going nowhere fast. His vague desire to become a chef has already been frustrated once, after he was expelled from a cooking school. Though she is angry with her son, Marie does believe he deserves better. When a client tells her about a prestigious cooking school that does not care about past grades, sending Adrien there becomes her entire raison d’être.

But passing the entry exam is one thing; paying the €9,000 tuition fee is another. As she scrambles to gather the money, Marie is forced into contact with the hostility towards sex workers that remains engrained in French society and the law (she cannot get a bank loan, for example). Her struggle eventually brings her to a shabby club in Germany, where she can make money fast but must give a share to the boss.

It is a bad situation, one that encourages bitter competition between employees who are all struggling. Director Cécile Ducrocq’s down-to-earth approach affords her characters dignity simply by never going out of its way to prove the obvious: that these are complex human beings who are simply doing their job. But beyond its cool-headed, documentary-like portrayal of an oft-sensationalised world, Her Way is also interesting as a portrait of its protagonist who, despite being a progressive, sophisticated “femme du monde” – as per the film’s French title – comes dangerously close to abandoning all her principles in favour of an end-justifies-the-means approach. Would she act this way had she been able to secure the money through other means? Maybe not. Does sending her son to cooking school warrant this behaviour? Marie herself isn’t certain.

No didactic exploration of right and wrong, the film remains dispassionate when her actions hurt others. It accounts for the pull of human emotions and the way sex work does not exist purely as an abstract concept, or – though it is work – as something that can be compartmentalised from the rest of one’s lived experience.

► Her Way is in UK cinemas from tomorrow.