Her Way
Une femme du monde
Cécile Ducrocq (2021)
As the lead in Caroline Vignal’s My Donkey, My Lover & I (2020), Laure Calamy gave an expert comic performance that was also emotionally rich. Her Way sees Calamy in a tougher, grimmer role that she consistently imbues with humour. As before, she’s remarkably engaging and likeable. These qualities may be part of her real self but it’s still a talent to express them on camera as another person. Laure Calamy shows bags of acting skill besides.
Her Way, Cécile Ducrocq’s second feature, is set in present-day Strasbourg. Calamy plays Marie, pushing forty, single parent of a seventeen-year-old son, Adrien (Nissim Renard). The word ‘prostitute’ is ‘burdened with considerable historical and cultural baggage’ (says an i piece by Kate Lister) though it’s how Marie describes herself – for example, to the young bank manager (uncredited on IMDb) from whom she tries and fails to get a loan. Yet the now more acceptable term ‘sex worker’ has rarely seemed as apt in mainstream screen fiction as it does in Her Way. Marie is desperate to raise funds to pay Adrien’s fees at the exclusive culinary school in Strasbourg where he wins a place. When her parents and the bank won’t help, she decides her only option is employment in a sex club across the German border in Offenburg – the euphemistically-named Oltromondo (Inferno would be nearer the mark). Marie puts in long hours driving to and from the club and working there as a performer and hostess. The latter label is another euphemism, familiar from films as otherwise different as From Here to Eternity (1953) and Sweet Charity (1969).
If she sticks to her usual patch and clients in Strasbourg, Marie hasn’t a hope of raising the money needed for the fees at the (fictional) Perrandier school (€9,000 a year, with the first instalment of €5,000 due in a matter of weeks). In 2016 the French National Assembly effectively de-legalised prostitution by introducing a €1,500 fine for customers caught paying for sex. Cécile Ducrocq shows street demonstrations by Marie and her co-workers, protesting the deterrent new law. Marie also has strong views about the importance of independent sex work. When she complains about the area’s Black prostitutes, she’s not being racist but lamenting that these girls are always controlled by pimps, who in effect dictate the going rate for local services more generally. Ducrocq outlines this economic and political context efficiently but it seems no more than context. Until Marie starts commuting to Germany, the film’s main focus is on the protagonist’s relationship with her son and exasperated efforts to rouse him from grumpy defeatism to looking to a future. In fact, and although it may not have been Ducrocq’s intention, this aspect is handled more persuasively than others throughout Her Way.
Adrien doesn’t call his mother a prostitute or a sex worker, in public anyway. He’s already been expelled from a bargain-basement cookery school (he added cannabis to the recipe for a mousse, which a tutor sampled). In mother-and-son’s interview with a careers adviser (Clara Mulot), Marie who does nearly all the talking but, when the adviser asks about her work, Adrien is quick to answer, ‘Home hairdresser’. It’s one of his mother’s clients, a married pharmacist called Martin (Maxence Tual), who draws Marie’s attention to Perrandier, which reputedly attaches less importance to an applicant’s qualifications and references than to the potential evident in their letter of application and interview. And it’s one of Marie’s work colleagues, a trans woman (Romain Brau) known only as ‘the lawyer’ because that’s what she studied to be, who takes on the herculean task of helping unwilling, transphobic Adrien to craft an application. When she’s telling other people about her son’s promise as a chef – her senior and trusted co-worker Camille (Béatrice Facquer) or her mother (Yolande Besombes) – Marie bubbles over with enthusiasm. But she doesn’t really believe Perrandier will offer Adrien a place and he’s sure they won’t. Both are astonished to be proved wrong – Adrien even smiles. Marie’s fund-raising race against the clock begins.
That makes Her Way sound like a formula film. It isn’t that exactly – it certainly doesn’t have a formulaic resolution – but Ducrocq and her co-writer, Stéphane Demoustier (writer-director of The Girl with a Bracelet (2019)), tell their story indecisively. We’re given no idea why Marie chose sex work as a career – or if she had no choice. She doesn’t seem unhappy with or ashamed by how she makes a living. Adrien may be ashamed – he’s at least sensitive to what others will think – but his habitually grumpy manner with his mother isn’t only an expression of resentment of her profession. The lack of backstory for Marie and of clarity as to Adrien’s attitude isn’t a problem in itself. Her Way might, indeed, be stronger if the heroine’s present situation were a given and Ducrocq simply described how far Marie was prepared to go for the sake of her son’s future. It therefore seems a miscalculation when Marie visits her parents, accompanied by Adrien, to ask to borrow money from them. The episode makes clear that her mother, without explicitly deploring Marie’s line of work, much regrets it. More important, Adrien is uncharacteristically chirpy on the visit. On arrival, he greets a dog like an old friend. It emerges that he used to live with his grandparents. It’s harder after this to accept that, in Marie’s numerous shouting matches with Adrien, there are never recriminations from him about their present circumstances compared with his earlier life. Since her parents don’t reappear the trip to their home comes to seem nothing more than the first in a predictable series of setbacks for Marie.
The scene in which she begs for work at the Oltromondo is, however, excellent. It’s clear Marie has had past dealings with Bruno (Sam Louwyck), the club’s owner (though not clear what those dealings were): there’s a powerful tension between her eager pleading and Bruno’s laconic scepticism. He nevertheless agrees to take her on, on a trial basis, for old times’ sake. Other early sequences at the club work well, too, as Tatiana (Diana Korudzhiyska), the hostesses’ no-nonsense supervisor, shows Marie the ropes and introduces her to an international line-up of colleagues, most of them suspicious of this mature newcomer to the team. One or two of the club’s customers supply necessary reminders of the danger and pain that sex work can involve. Later on, there’s a good moment when, after a fracas in the club, Bruno calmly offers clientele an apology and drinks on the house. Sam Louwyck’s delivery of the line tells you that Bruno has had plenty of practice speaking it.
But Ducrocq is too anxious to work in melodramatic incidents and plot twists, as if the narrative won’t be interesting enough without them. Awa (Amlan Larcher), an African girl working at the club, is arrested as an illegal immigrant. The Oltromondo pays better than the streets of Strasbourg but not as well as Marie thought or needs; she discovers, while helping Tatiana to clear Awa’s bedroom, an envelope tucked into the mattress. The envelope contains a thousand euros and Marie pockets it, though she feels guilty about doing so. Awa is released, returns to the club and discovers her money has gone. When she accuses Tatiana of the theft, it seems inevitable the boss woman will point the finger at Marie but she doesn’t – not, that is, until the latter’s conscience gets the better of her. It’s only when she returns the envelope to Awa’s locker that Awa decides Marie was the thief and Tatiana remembers that Marie stripped Awa’s bed. This is an unwieldy way of getting Marie fired by Bruno and an earlier incident is even clumsier. Marie is frustrated at her lack of profile on the club’s website until the night Tatiana informs her that a young man has arrived, insisting on seeing Marie: it’s Adrien, here to tell his mother, in disgust, that one of his pals in Strasbourg has seen online images of her at the Oltromondo. Outside the place, he continues to rail at his mother and is beaten up by the club’s security man (Mahir Fekih-Slimane). It makes no sense that Adrien comes all the way from Strasbourg to create this showdown – even less sense that, when they return home, the upsetting incident isn’t mentioned again and appears to have had no effect on Adrien.
The melodrama gathers pace in Strasbourg, Marie sprinting from one stop to the next on her via dolorosa. Unable to persuade Perrandier by phone to extend the deadline for payment of fees, she bursts into the place, demanding that the pleasant administrator (Marie Schoenbock) produces the school’s director. After being thrown out of there, Marie goes to the prefabs where her client Martin sees Black prostitutes; she threatens to blackmail him with photographs she has taken of his visits there unless he gives her the money she needs. Martin tells her to get lost and, when she remonstrates, pushes her to the ground. She realises her efforts to raise funds for her son are doomed and admits as much to Adrien when she gets back to their apartment. Even though Laure Calamy’s empathy with Marie is infectious, this turning point is good news for the film. When Marie gives up, Cécile Ducrocq also stops fighting her material and starts to reap the benefits of seeds planted at an earlier, less frantic stage of proceedings.
Despite his ambitions, Adrien normally subsists on junk food and drink. Whether in student accommodation at the start or at his mother’s place later on, he’s surrounded – whenever he’s out of bed – by empty cans and crisps packets. The character teeters on the edge of teenage-layabout cartoon but there’s always a bit more to Nissim Renard than that – and Adrien’s culinary interests are revealed gradually and effectively. The scene in which the lawyer conducts a mock interview with Adrien is a highlight, the interviewee monosyllabic until he loses patience when asked why he wants to be a chef and snaps back, ‘I don’t know – why are you a tranny?’ The lawyer takes a deep breath and explains that she always liked wearing women’s clothes and, as a law student, started turning tricks. The resilient reply startles Adrien, prising out of him a childhood memory of first looking in a cookery book and being fascinated by what he saw. When Marie starts her stint in Germany, she insists Adrien also gets a job – ‘McDonald’s, anything’. He starts work at a café-bar, waiting tables and generally helping out. The owner eventually gives him a chance to prepare a dish or two. By the end of the film, Adrien is cheffing regularly at the place and loving it. He doesn’t need a culinary school for a happy ending: as he told his mother early on, Perrandier was for ‘posh kids’ anyway.
With the help of costume designer Ariane Daurat, Ducrocq and Calamy play a variation on the screen cliché of tart-with-a-heart-of-gold. Marie has a matching coat – or, at least, a faux cloth-of-gold trench coat that’s her virtual uniform. Her age, however, keeps changing (auditioning for Bruno, she says she’s thirty-five, then thirty-nine, in the space of a few gabbled sentences). Laure Calamy was forty-six when she made the film but easily passes for ten years younger. She’s vivacious, dynamic and glamorous yet never seems too classy. In the penultimate scene, Marie goes to a party, attended also by Camille, the lawyer and her other colleagues. We last saw this group together on their street protest. It’s a little confusing that Ducrocq stages this later gathering as a celebration: it gives the impression the prostitutes’ working conditions are now changing for the better – but it’s not clear how. Still, the scene is more than justified as Marie dances along, and alone, to a favourite pop song (I didn’t recognise it). Laure Calamy wonderfully conveys Marie’s mixed feelings here – of relief, regret, self-affirmation. In the closing sequence, she’s back on the Strasbourg streets touting for business. Marie approaches a car and speaks to the driver. The car pulls away. Cécile Ducrocq’s heroine is, as the film’s French title indicates, a woman of the world. As the driver goes on his way, Laure Calamy’s face confirms that Marie knows the score but tells you, in the same expression, that a no is always a rejection. Her Way is nothing special but the leading lady is so dominantly excellent that you end up feeling you admire not only her but the film as a whole.
10 July 2023