Working Girls

One day in a brothel run out of a middle-class apartment in Manhattan. Molly is a college graduate who wants to be a photographer and takes shifts here, and the film follows her working hours: changing towels, counting condoms, talking to clients, negotiating with the madam. Lizzie Borden builds neither a moral judgement nor an erotic display; she presents sex work directly as work, which is to say routine, dull and beset by management problems. The camera keeps its distance and the scenes are short. Its sharpest observation is the language the madam uses with the women, every sentence that of an office manager. It played at Sundance and became a reference point in American independent film. Who it is for: viewers who like feminist cinema and independent films about labour. Who it is not for: anyone expecting dramatic escalation, since this is deliberately flat.