by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Andrea Werhun, Gwen Adora, Richard Botell, Mylene Carino, Carole Brown, Kitoko Mai
Intro:
… an insightful look at sex work that balances serious workplace analysis with a decidedly unserious sense of humour.
After consulting on the Oscar smash hit Anora, and her magnetic turn in Paying For It, it’s about time that writer and former sex worker Andrea Werhun got her own movie. Granted, this feature documentary is an expansion of her and writer/director Nicole Bazuin’s 2020 short film, itself an adaptation of Werhun’s memoir of the same name, but for someone seemingly born to shine on-camera, being the focus for an hour-plus is the right call, and one that Modern Whore doesn’t waste.
Building on her and Bazuin’s rapport from the 2020 short, the elevated make-up tutorial Last Night at the Strip Club, and more recent Thriving: A Dissociated Reverie (whose main subject, Kitoko Mai, appears here as well), Modern Whore is every bit as colourfully camp as anything else they’ve worked on together. Its palette is equal parts dreamy and vibrant, as bright and bold as its central figure, albeit with a slight sensation that John Wick might be practising gun kata nearby.
Over its skimpy run time, the frame shifts and shimmers between camera-facing interview footage, table conversations reminiscent of a video podcast, and sequences that both play into the fantastical trope-laden perception of sex work in the popular consciousness, and its decidedly less glamourous reality.
Its general tone regarding sex work shows the subject’s connection to Anora strongly, even without Sean Baker’s attachment as executive producer. Its business-forward perspective on the job like it’s any other form of employment, deriding its more cinematic assumptions concerning trauma and ‘the need to be saved’, and through the involvement of Mai and others, giving the film’s scope something beyond just the White cisgendered experience of Werhun herself. It pairs great with Anora in its down-to-earth underpinnings, but with a sweeter edge of theatrical playfulness that helps buoy the film’s drier shop talk… and some of the more disturbing aspects of Werhun’s work history.
Not that this is some kind of colour-washed trauma showcase; if anything, it actively rails against the business being viewed through that lens. Throughout, certain admittedly straight-forward terms like trauma porn and abbreviations to do with sex are written out in definition. It’s a film that aims to break past assumptions made about those in the industry, and it reciprocates by not making any assumptions about the audience, namely what they know (or at least what they think they know) going into it. It aids the film’s equilateral tone, seeking to de-stigmatise sex work without turning it into something wholly clinical, as enjoying oneself is the point of the thing. It doesn’t shy away from the downsides, but only as it pertains to the work itself, as opposed to any number of armchair psychological presumptions about why it’s happening in the first place. From eerily familiar interactions with reviewers, to abusive encounters on the job, to lines of questioning that are as potentially nuanced as they are audaciously pitiful (without getting too specific, they reek of the same hypocrisy as degrading fast food workers for not doing something better with their lives… while waiting in-line to order from those same people), there’s just enough seriousness behind the garishness to keep it informative and fun but not superfluous.
Modern Whore is an insightful look at sex work that balances serious workplace analysis with a decidedly unserious sense of humour. Its conversational pace gives Andrea Werhun all the space needed to be positively electric for the entire run time, and even if not every statement shines new light, it creates effective parallels with more general workplace standards and expectations that boost the film’s key goal of stripping away all the pop culture baggage and embracing the naked truth of this work and, more importantly, why it’s worth treating as work. Services do not exist without a market, and if it’s good enough to pay for, it’s good enough to be fair.
