Working Girls (1986)

I have no idea how, but I started this thinking it was a documentary. Instead, it’s a fictional account of one sex worker’s double shift at a NYC brothel. It’s quite a low budget film and took me a bit to get into the film. The soundtrack is amongst the most jarring I’ve ever heard and the acting is often times stilted to the degree of cheap porn. Unlike porn, the sex scenes are possibly the most unerotic ones ever filmed. The male characters are almost uniformly caricatures, so that the film focuses instead on aspects of 1980s capitalism and how the shrill boss’s control, real and imagined, over her workers is all based on the almighty dollar. I had a hard time throughout ignoring the setting and how there was almost no security or private areas for the staff. I’m by no means an expert in the field, but it all seemed like really poor safety design. It did turn the brothel into a very mundane workplace, complete with petty jealousies and various aggravations.