The movie was surprisingly well versed on the trade, at least at that high level. We see Chelsea shopping for shoes, and outside is her ‘rival’ girl with one of her guys. Sure, what we see is that flicker of jealousy, but what I saw was a guy with a girl on the street looking at shoes. Who imagines the joy a guy gets from being with a girl in other places than bed? The scene in which Chelsea is confused about the behavior of her client was also well done–girls are always a bit worried about small changes in behavior.

The other pretty ‘inside’ thing was the website reviewer douchebag. He nails her in the review, but who in the audience even understood what was going on? The film was pretty smart in that portion, because a negative review kills a girl’s pysche, even if it’s a place nobody visits. It also struck me because I’m a very active reviewer of girls. The quid pro quo of a reviewer doing positive reviews for freebies has actually happened to me, but not intentionally, and not overtly. From my experience, I had to smile at the notion that anyone would use the phrase ‘flat affect’ and the rest of that purple prose to describe a girl. Even among the high-paying customers, semi-literacy is rampant. What you really get is subjectless sentences: ‘Saw Chelsea, she’s not as hot as you’d think. I pay a lot, expect a lot,’ etc.

But what bugged me about the film was the guys. Yes, most guys are just as cardboard as the film depicts. But the girlfriend experience, for a guy, is MUCH more than anything the character of Chelsea gets to explore. Judging by the fellow johns I’ve talked to, about 10% of men legitimately fall in love, revers the sequence of innocent attraction>sex so that it goes sex>innocent attraction. For them (I should say ‘us’ because I’m one, the lasting scene is not the obsessive, kvetching, grasping, bragging guys who populate most of the film, but the rival girl on the street with Chelsea’s former client, who’s enjoying the exceptional fun of the illusion of love with a beautiful woman, in public, doing mundane things.

Many – many – people have comment on Sasha’s “flat” affect (in fact, that’s one of the diss’ lobbed at her by the awful website reviewer). But her voice, drained of inflection, noncommittal in the extreme, seemed the most accurate element of her hooking skills. Her voice presented her as hooker-as-therapist: a tabula rosa upon which customers wrote their desires, etc. She listened and, when she did respond, her monosyllabia was exactly what the set-up called / calls for.

Photography is the most reductive rendering whore/sex workers ie., what you see is what you get (I disagree.) What the movie crucially left out is the tactile experience which, in my experience at least, is the essentially aural nature of sex work (you are what you say – or don’t – as much or more than how you look). The journalist character articulated it best one of the restaurant interview scenes (towards the end) when he ran down Chelsea’s calculated – and appealing – presentation: the hair, the look, the everything she is just by being.

What I found more difficult (impossible) to buy was her willingness to walk through the back office door of the self-styled website reviewer: anyone with her book would have taken one look at the furniture store, turned and left. She was too seasoned a girl to ever buy into that b.s. And if she did, the website dude was way too much of a buffoon. She – maybe this is just me – would never have let him onto the field, much less played.

Also, the movie – and this is my subjectivity coming through- seemed more gay, notionally, than anything else. Heterosexual relationships wither and die when one partner inevitably becomes mommy. I think this is why gay relationships are so infuriating to so many because an agreement, like the one between Sasha (cut off the long hair and she’s looks more like a transgirl than a woman ie., slim hipped, the extremely self-conscious poses in the last scene) and her pretty boy boyfriend (who looks like a great trainer). Gay relationships, at least the ones I’ve been in and observed, generally allow one (or both) to step out, fuck around, whatever.

The movie – as I read it – was retro in its contrarian take on the sort of enforced monogamy put forth by Gabriel Rotello in the late 90’s (and now writ as Prop 8, etc.) and which currently has so much currency in the gay community. Still, through the character’s lives, I saw the value of companionship and in the impossibility of monogamy.

A nuanced, evocative film. That would be the review of this **Natural Born Hooker***

The key problem with this tedious film is that the characters weren’t complex at all, nor were they interesting caricatures. Doesn’t matter if they’re sex workers or cosmonauts, Give your people some depth or don’t bother.
These people were flat as roadkill.