Sex Work Through The Lens Of Sylvie Verheyde
By: Aurore Phipps
Tags: Netflix, Sex Work, Women, Movies To Watch, French Cinema

Six years after her attempt at depicting sex work through film with ‘Sex Doll’ (2016), French film director Sylvie Verheyde released this year via Netflix ‘Madame Claude’ the very real story of a French madam with a tumultuous life and high-profile clients. Let us explore her style, outlook and the originality of her work.

With Sex Doll and Madame Claude, French director Sylvie Verheyde paints the portraits of two women whose destinies, however parallel, never seem to fully intersect. The Sex Doll, Virginie, is a fictitious young and melancholic sex worker. Claude is a much older madam who existed in real life. Through these characters, the director retells sex workers’ lives in different spatial and temporal realms with an ambiguous tenderness or a distanced gaze.

Tracing the Parisian life of a French madam of the Fifth French Republic, Madame Claude is marked, from its very beginning, by the narrative voice of Karole Rocher. Verheyde allows the romanesque Madame Claude to take control of her story:

“I realized very early that men treat us like whores, I decided to be the queen of whores.”

Her commanding speech is complemented by her methodical gestures, set to ‘She’s A Queen’ by The Tyrannies, a psychedelic rock track from the 1960s. The camera follows her as she gets ready for the birthday party of one of her girls, Nadège. She touches up her mascara and stares at herself in the mirror. Madame Claude is preparing for the role of a hawk-eyed superintendent, around which she organized her entire life.

actress Hafsia Herzi in “Sex Doll” (Les films du Veyrier — The Bureau)

In ‘Sex Doll’, the atmosphere is quieter. The very first scene is less direct — the viewer needs time to adjust to the camera as it gets closer to Virginie’s skin. The close-up on Virginie’s face gets less blurry by the second, the camera becomes the hand of the man who caresses her half-naked body. Virginie seems tense, and her eyes staring into the void do not display any form of expression. She just wants to get this over with, and patiently endures what is happening to her by dissociating from her body and not saying a word. We will hear her voice a little later — a voice so soft that it does not disturb the ambient silence of the film.

Films about sex work have often been approached by sulfurous male filmmakers as a way to paint caricaturized and miserable portraits of (very) young sex workers subjugated to the men who either captured or saved them. Despite the influence of these clichés on her own cinematic style, Verheyde makes the bet, slightly risqué at times, to offer to the viewer a more humanistic vision of women who have been building themselves from the ground up. These women are attracted to luxury, independence and financial freedom, and the right to self-determination. They fiercely persevere in a world that is blatantly hostile to them. Verheyde gets inside their heads and lives. The director captures our attention through their body language. The multiple facial close-ups and intimate scenes take us on this confidential journey as secretive as the inside of a dimly lit boudoir. Verheyde’s choice of approaching her subjects upfront is however far removed from voyeuristic intents that consist of observing “promiscuous” women through the hole of a lock. The director does not seem to gloss over the realities of these women’s lives. When Virginie and Claude go to parties and perform enjoyment, their expressionless faces, intermittently lit by the lights of the bars, betray a long life of pretense and forced fun. Verheyde’s style is sincere and aesthetically pleasing, with subdued lights and blurry framing that tell the story of the nocturnal nature of sex work.

Where the filmmaker lacked regularity and deep commitment in ‘Sex Doll’, she made up for in ‘Madame Claude’, where the diversity of women brings out protean complexities. The influential figure of Madame Claude is complemented by the presence of her protégée, Sidonie, played by the young and talented Garance Marillier. Indeed, Claude (whose real name was Fernande Grudet) came from a poor, provincial family and learned the étiquette of high Parisian spheres so she could inculcate them to her “family”. Sidonie however, was born into this prestigious world, and in an attempt to rebel against an abusive father, reclaims her autonomy by becoming Claude’s right-hand woman. This touching relationship highlights Claude’s immense loneliness and her inability to make herself vulnerable in the eyes of others. Her cultivated image of ironwoman, sometimes cruel and insensitive is isolating. Verheyde’s Claude is somewhat stern with a severe facial expression, perpetual frown, and dark-toned clothes, so when during one of the most touching scenes of the film she takes refuge in a dark closet where only a few rays of light filter through the cracks and bursts in tears as her “family” playfully bicker in the next room, we cannot help but feel empathetic towards her. She places a perfectly manicured hand over her mouth to muffle her cries, her eyes wrinkled with pain — a deep inner pain. Madame Claude is a businesswoman, and an almost maternal figure unable to be happy.

Karole Rocher in “Madame Claude”, by Sylvie Verheyde (2021). | Screen Capture Netflix France via Youtube

This approach, full of empathy and compassion, contrasts with the often indifferent or downright disgusted gaze Verheyde casts upon the men in Virginie and Claude’s stories. The clients of the sex workers are older, depicted as sweaty red pigs with open pores. The men with whom they share their personal lives are mysterious, with cigarettes perpetually glued to their lips. The young Virginie falls in love with Rupert, her hard-bitten guardian angel with whom she shares a love scene where, unlike the film's opening scene, she closes her eyes and consents to having sex with him in an act of perceptible vulnerability. Meanwhile, Claude tries to love André, a quiet younger man she met at the bar she regularly goes to for her shady business deals. Yet, she cannot afford to be vulnerable and their relationship seems doomed. Claude refuses to open up to her lover, and André impatiently sleeps with Nadège, the birthday girl from the introductory birthday party scene. Men are also depicted as brutes. In ‘Sex Doll’, the fuzzy sequence with jerky close-ups in which two men try to rape Virginie and the young sex worker who accompanies her shows men in their most primitive form, violent and entitled. In ‘Madame Claude’, dangerous men are everywhere: they are the French intelligence officer who forces Claude to collaborate with his services; they are Paul, who utters threats against Claude by strangling her in the darkest corner of a cabaret; they are the powerful politicians who fear her and try to intimidate her into silence.

actress Hafsia Herzi, in “Sex Doll” by Sylvie Verheyde. LES FILMS DU VEYRIER — THE BUREAU

Verheyde succeeded in not reducing these women to the men they were connected to. Claude had high-profile male clients but was not defined by her connection to them. Similarly, Virginie decides to stop doing sex work of her own accord and not because of her love for Rupert. She leaves London to be closer to her family in France. For the real Madame Claude, life was not that simple. After several prison sentences on charges of tax evasion and sexual procurement, a brief stay in the States, and some interviews with the press, she withdrew from the mundane, public life of an ever-changing Paris, which was no longer the same after the sexual revolution of the 1970s.