Whores on Film, Part One

Pretty Woman, 1990

Vivian: I would’ve stayed for two thousand

Edward: I would’ve paid four.

I could try to be forcibly avant-garde and leave Pretty Woman out an audit of call girls on screen, but why be difficult? When folk think of cinematic escorts, I don’t need to conduct a large scale data set to make the claim that it’s the most famous (perhaps with one exception). The film itself is a bit work-a-day, formulaic and would’ve fallen down the sluice of pop-culture history if it were not for the beguiling breakaway performance by Roberts. A so-so script is sparkled to life by her earthy beauty and sweet-salty charm, as well as by the seeming organic chemistry between her and her leading chap, the prince of silver-foxes, Richard Gere. You’ve probably seen it, or know of it through social osmosis, but its about a streetwalker on Beverly Hills who is accidentally picked up by a wealthy businessman and ends up spending a week with him on his dime, her effervescence and warm-spiritedness leading him to fall in love and put the kibosh on his money-obsessed, workaholic ways.

It does moralise on the sex industry, seemingly taking greater issue with the notion of transactional intimacy than the building of ships for the American war machine. But, on the other hand, it does something not unimportant with the figure of the prostitute that few large-scale media had done before, or for that matter, since. Vivian is humanised, she is neither Madonna nor whore, sinner or saint; sure, its a bubblegum rom-com so in the end she leaves ‘the life’ behind for her knight in shining armour, but its still mildly transgressive to present a woman not having been ‘destroyed’ by life on the hustle.

Oh, and I’d remiss not to through in a little trivia ‘did you know moment?’ here, but did you know that before Disney bought the rights to make Pretty Woman (through its subsidiary Touchstone) it was going to be called 3000 (in reference to the amount Edward pays Viv for a week of her company in dollars), and it was due to have an unromantic ending and Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer were considered for the roles? What a different film that would’ve been.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961

Moon River, wider than a mile
I'm crossin' you in style, some day
Old dream maker, you heartbreaker
Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world
There's such a lot of world to see
We're after the same rainbow's end
Waitin' 'round the bend
My huckleberry friend, Moon River and me

It does and doesn’t fail to surprise me how often it is missed that Audrey Hepburn’s classic role in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s is that of a New York call girl in the 1960s. There was a time, when I was coming of age in the late 2000s, where you couldn't move for pinkified/printified Holly Golightly ephemera - posters, mugs, keychains, cheap bed linen - often pitched at teenage girls and petite-bourgeois housewives (two demographics with curiously intersecting interior fashion palettes+)

It’s probably more famous than Pretty Woman, indeed, it’s one of the most ‘classic’ romances of all time. But the fact that it is the story of a high class escort is more subtly coded, and so it less often shows up in the appropriate ‘lists’. I’ve never read the Truman Capote novella that it was based upon++ but as I understand it the film romanticises the ending and makes the escorting references more gentle. Golightly is, on the surface, a party girl and a fashionable bohemian…but she pays her way by socialising with well-to-do gentlemen and getting £50 “for the powder room”. Added, her love interest, a money-struggling writer (there are few other kinds) played by George Peppard, is being paid more explicitly to have a sexual affair with a glamorous, but testing, older woman. It is curious in itself that the male gigolo’s sexuality is more overtly rendered than the female, in the still sex-shy early 1960s. He is paid for his athletic body, she is paid for something more intangible…her charisma, her wit, her enigma, something the film seeks to unravel.

It does a forensic job on the troubled history of the elegant, independent, urbane woman, a narrative archetype typified but the female socialite, the creative’s muse, the high class escort and the old Hollywood diva, who Hepburn/Golightly is all at once. Indeed, like a lot of early 1960s cinema, its main subject matter is not escorting itself, but the shift in culture from the idealism of early modernity and silver-screen Hollywood, to the skepticism of postmodernity and a growing trend for materialism and photo-realism.

In a way it’s a nostalgic paean to both the fading gloss of old-glamour and an elegy to the bohemian dream, both getting lost down the armchairs of the 1960s growing penchant for cinematic cynicism . Melodrama, love, beauty, dreaminess; blood-splattered streets, crashing cities and deadened sex etc. We, the spectator, divest a sadness from Holly’s singing of “Moon River”, because it’s ultimately a film about giving up on the hope of finding nervous fulfilment through freedom and letting go of utopian, epicurean, creative and adventurous aspiration, in place of a confrontation with the seaminess of the ‘real’. Both the writer and the whore give up on their libertine ways, rescue a nameless cat from the back alleys in the grey rain, and get ready (one presumes) to settle in for each other, and the long, cold ride of reality.

Belle de Jour, 1967

"Art is the revelation of nature's darkest secrets, those that remain hidden beneath the everyday appearance."

To France now, and to one of surrealist Luis Bunuel’s more accessible outings (an easier cinematic slurp than Un Chien Andalou, especially if you are weird about your eyeballs being touched). I could keep revisiting this masterwork about a Parisian brothel, simply to gawp at the astounding, glaciel beauty of to-be Chanel model Catherine Deneuve, for the erotic charge between multiple of the leads (including the Sapphic subtext between Deneuve’s protagonist, Severine, and brothel owner Madame Anais, played by Geneviève Page) and for the militaristic fashions constructed by Yves Saint Laurent, that Deneuve sported.

It's not a side point, either, the fashion. Its thematic. Severine is an uptown bourgeois, married to a doctor, carrying a loaded pistol of erotic fantasies that her life as an afternoon escort serve to sate. Her double breasted designer coats are her uniform outside of the brothel; they are her armoury, holding her repressed sexuality inwards, along with a clipped, haughty demeanour. It contrasts with her behaviour and experiences in the brothel and the content of her sadomasochistic daydreams; loose silks, crepe dresses and creamy nudity wrapped in ruffled bedlinen, and a performative mix of fearfulness, self-loathing, resistance, desirousness, embarrassment, and post-coital languorousness, even touches of warmth. The bourgeois norms are utilitarian, neat and deceptive. The brothel transgressions are sensual, messy and revelatory.

In classic surrealist style, repression is the film’s constant undertow, influenced as Bunuel had been by the growing popularity of psychoanalysis in the early to mid 20th Century. Freudianism, and surrealism, explored the cold respectable face of moral order, the anarchisms of the dreams and nightmares that lurk in the subterranean, and the derma layer of angst that tries to make sure that ‘never the twain shall meet’. That was an agenda; to collapse that architecture and expose viewers to their own worst fears and most deeply suppressed desires at once… and in fashion the brothel - an ‘in between space’ where the moral order is temporarily suspended - serves as a potent environment in that service.

KISSES, CORA LEIGH

UK INDEPENDENT ESCORT, DOMINATRIX & COMPANION

+A bit ‘meow’ of me I grant you.

++Like Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, there was a lot of speculation at the time about the real woman behind the Capote character, however the writer himself said that Golightly was a composite of various women he had known, including models and socialites, his own mother, and the actress Marilyn Monroe, who he had originally wanted for the role. And much as I love Monroe, I think the subtler sexuality of Hepburn worked better in this melancholy film.