A film about stripping worried about boundaries, My Sole Desire (À Mon Seul Désir) is a bit like that J-Lo movie Hustlers but with not as many clothes, a bit more honesty and a touch less Hollywood make-believe. Good though Hustlers was, it wasn’t always in touch with reality.
But back to Lucie Borleteau’s movie, which like Hustlers sees the world of stripping from the point of view of a newbie. Shy, retiring student and part-time grocery-shop cashier Manon (Louise Chevillotte) pitches up at a strip club wondering how a fit young woman goes about getting a job like this. Within minutes she’s been renamed Aurore, has made a best friend in stripper/would-be-actor Mia (Zita Hanrot) and is taking her clothes off with the best of them.
In Fidelio: Alice’s Journey, Borleteau wondered how a pretty young woman with a functioning libido would operate in the all-male atmosphere on board a cargo ship. She’s asking an adjacent question here – what gives us pause once that first taboo has been broken?
Manon/Aurore can do straightforward floor work, stripping for appreciative male customers at €10 an hour. Or, if she wants, she can make €30 for a 15-minute private dance with a customer who is not allowed to touch her. Or if he does touch her it’s at her say-so and he pays more. How much more? And where is the line after that?
Borleteau skirmishes away at this frontier like an advance platoon, suggesting it is both incredibly fuzzy and yet starkly significant. As Manon/Aurore starts working at external events – a stag party for three guys here, a one-on-one for a customer she has taken a slight fancy to – she slides almost imperceptibly from being a student earning her way through college to prostitute, and is transformed by the money she’s earning. “Fast money” and “good money” are two separate equations, an old hand in the backstage changing room says early on, a warning that seems to have whooshed right over Manon’s head.
Up top Borleteau tells an entirely different story, but one that’s also about boundaries, the romantic tale of Manon and Mia who first become allies, then friends and then fall in love, passionately. Mia is straight and so is Manon (probably) and yet here they are with their hands in each other’s pants at every opportunity.
This story is touching (literally), erotically presented and brilliantly conveyed by Chevillotte and Hanrot. The fact that it doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of it is probably because it’s not meant to – something pure versus something corrupt being the suggestion – but in any case it’s the love story in My Sole Desire that comes across as the less compelling. With the stripping/hooking element Borleteau suggests it’s Manon’s soul that’s on the line. The stakes here are that Mia’s boyfriend Sebastian might find out.
How brilliantly cast and played this movie is, particularly by Chevillotte and Hanrot, who are both plausible as hot young women who take their clothes off for a living and as friends and lovers.
And how warm and cosy the strip club looks. Borleteau and her DP Alexis Kavyrchine really go all out to make À Mon Seul Désir, as it’s called, a collegiate, sisterly (mostly) cocoon of women helping each other out. The sole male – bouncer/doorman Pablo (Pedro Casablanc) – is an avuncular softie beneath his flinty exterior.
Borleteau is also good on the attractions of prostitution – there is excitement to be gleaned from an encounter with someone you’ve never met before. Danger has its own attractions, even if more often than not the customer turns out to be a dotard with only a memory where his sex drive used to be.
This is no apologia, and nor is it a condemnation of the patriarchy or of systems of exploitation. It’s also not one for the prudish – there’s an awful lot of female flesh on display (tellingly, male nudity is not on the menu). There’s an awful lot of everything, in fact, and a bit of dramatic compression (like, say, removing 15 minutes of material) wouldn’t have hurt.
In the end, a bit like Hustlers, it’s a celebration of girl power. In the final scene, set in the club, an ensemble dance blurs another boundary, the line between character and actor. In among the real-life strippers giving it their best, you might spot Ariane Labed, Borleteau’s star in Fidelio: Alice’s Journey, back to shake her stuff about.
My Sole Desire aka À Mon Seul Désir – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
