Anna Karina as Nana in Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie. Photograph: Kobal
Every so often, the prostitution issue flares up, and is then swept back under the carpet, that being the best place for such paradoxically desired but undesirable aspects of our world. But the carpet is not the only place for such things, and cinema has been, traditionally, one of its most visible homes, writes Guy Dammann.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its being the central market for the fantasy trade - "There's nothing like the movies. Usually when you see women, they're dressed. But put them in a movie, and you see their backsides", as the lead in Godard's Le Mepris has it - prostitution is an unusually prominent theme in the history of film. With its vaudeville origins, of course, low-class demi-monde figures were stock characters in the early days. By 1932, though, Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express had focused the lens on the courtesan's unseemly trade.
Shanghai Lil may be said to be the inaugural manifestation of the perfect cinema prostitute. With strong echoes in Barbara Streisand's 50-cent call girl in The Owl and the Pussycat (Herbert Ross, 1970) and Julia Roberts' exceedingly well-mannered streetwalker in Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), the courtesan figure plays a kind of transfigured Eliza Doolittle role. Because the majority of films use sex to control the emotional dynamic of the action, characters for whom sex has no further mystery are accorded a kind of magical power, a position of authority from which they can reveal to the other characters truths, about themselves or the world.
Prostitution is not always shot with such rose-tinted cameras, however. Neil Jordan's early Mona Lisa (1986) was a pretty grim affair, to say the least. Other films, such as Billy Wilder's light-hearted Irma La Douce (1963), and Woody Allen's skewed reversal of the prodigal son story, Mighty Aphrodite (1995), simply employ to great comedic effect the vague unease felt by audiences attempting to find a place for ladies of the night in their repertoire of stock emotional ascriptions. Another interesting example, LA Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997) uses the figure of the lookalike prostitute as a resonant metaphor for the film's main narrative: things just ain't what they seem.
The greatest prostitution film is, of course, Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa Vie. Made in 1962, and starring Godard's then-lover Anna Karina, Vivre sa Vie manages to frame some hard-nosed documentation of the Parisian sex trade within a story of such universal significance, and of such inordinately beautiful telling, that the result is mind blowing. As with all Godard's movies, the central theme concerns the way our selves are made up of conflicting narratives whose authorship is far from certain. Nana's (Karina) journey from luckless sales assistant to the initially powerful-seeming position of the pimp's favourite new girl allows for a poignant example of the traps these existential stories can set for us all. And in the case of prostitution, of course, rewriting your own story pretty soon ceases to be your own responsibility. The film ends with Nana being shot, by accident; her fate, which has long since ceased to be a matter of her own will, now no longer a matter of any one else's either.
