The comparison’s too obvious. Ken Russell’s 1991 film Whore came out the year after Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman; both are stories of Hollywood hookers, but Russell’s movie is a bracing antidote to the romcom treacle of Marshall’s, deftly balancing irony and honest seediness. It made almost no money in its original run, while Marshall’s tedious and unfunny fairy tale broke banks.
Nothing’s surprising in that, but it’s disappointing that Whore drew more critical hatred than usual for a Ken Russell film. A fascinating movie with a startling central performance, it’s an adaptation of David Hines’ play Bondage, which itself was synthesized out of chats Hines, a taxi driver, had with prostitutes who took his cab after their late-night work. Russell and actress Deborah Dalton adapted Hines’ work for film, and transplanted the action to Los Angeles when Russell couldn’t get funding in Britain.
The play was a monologue told by a prostitute named Liz, and Russell keeps that structure. We follow Liz (Theresa Russell, no relation) trying to pick up tricks, hear her reflect on her life and experiences, and see her run from a sleazy guy (Benjamin Mouton) chasing her. That guy turns out to be her pimp, Blake. Their relationship drives the drama of the story; she has to get him money, or else.
We hear from Liz about how they met and why she needs a pimp for safety. At one point Liz ends up chatting in a theater with a down-and-out Rastafarian (Antonio Fargas), and their conversation’s broken up by cutaways to Blake’s contrasting self-justifying monologue; like a lot of Russell’s tricks, it sounds obvious, but it works.
There’s a violent but happy ending, which isn’t much of an ending. There’s no sense that Liz is going to get her life together and change careers and become happier. That’s important to stress because Russell consciously plays with the formulas of melodrama throughout the film. Liz is a fallen woman, and Blake a villain who, if he had a moustache, would be twirling it every moment. When Liz narrates a mid-film flashback recalling a time she was happy while living with a lesbian friend, the interlude ends with Blake bursting in and abducting her in a scene that plays like something out of a silent-movie serial.
In another flashback Liz spies on her young son, raised by foster parents, and she’s dressed up like something out of a Douglas Sirk film. Again, the excess is conscious. The costuming’s quietly excellent in general, but the technical ability of Russell and cinematographer Amir Mokri (who’d go on to work with Michael Bay and Zack Snyder) mean that we see what Russell wants us to see, and mostly that grounds us in well-lit deep focus reality. We get the public places of high-class 1991 Los Angeles, the facades of its rich hotels and its elaborate fountains, contrasted with the grimy bars and undersides of freeways.
The movie works because of how well it balances that grim reality with a playful irony. Early on Liz gives her monologue in a tawdry strip club; later there’s a flashback scene in a fancy restaurant that’s a manifestly unreal set; and you take away that Liz understands and recognizes the scuzzy side of the city, but has no idea what to do with the glimpses she gets of the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It doesn’t always work—while the restaurant scene is a contrast with a similar scene in Pretty Woman, it also highlights the limitations of the film’s budget. But in broad strokes Russell gets at what he wants.
The pervasive irony in the film is a distancing effect, but it doesn’t blunt the harshness of what Liz tells us. As the movie goes on we recognize more and more of what she says about sex and life in general; when she tells us how pimps cultivate and then turn on the women they exploit, we recognize the techniques of abusers and manipulators. The sexuality in the film might’ve been more than critics expected, in the years before everybody carried a pornography machine in their pocket, but at this point it seems well-integrated into the story.
Theresa Russell’s Liz is perfect—proud and direct, not bright but savvy, decent without having a heart anything like gold. Russell brings out the irony in the material perfectly, not allowing it to overshadow the reality of Liz while also not allowing that reality to overwhelm the film. Mouton’s Blake is an effective incarnation of a specifically 1991 sleaze, with a distinct undercurrent of the corporate villain: as he says, there’s not much difference between him and a temp agency, and if prostitution were legal he’d open an office.
Russell’s often told stories with themes of power and sex, and they come together here as they rarely have in his other movies. His other usual theme, art, is symbolically present as well. Liz is a performer, who at one point reads a script a john’s prepared for her.
This is, quietly, one of the stranger films in Russell’s oeuvre. But it’s also in many ways of a piece with the previous 20 years of his work: conscious provocation, deep-rooted irony, and warm-hearted sympathy for the exploited. Russell’s drawn a lot of flak over the years, but in my reading his movies have a humanist sense of empathy at their core. That empathy, along with his jaunty nose-thumbing of taboo and convention, may have angered critics, especially in Britain. But who cares for critics, anyway?