‘Elles’ explores students’ seamy side

Years ago, journalists and prostitutes were taught the same adage: Don’t get emotionally involved. But that was before blogs and Craigslist redefined the requirements for two of the world’s oldest professions.

In the French drama “Elles,” Juliette Binoche plays a multitasking magazine reporter whose mind and marriage are opened wide by a pair of part-time call girls. It’s a fine performance in a forthright film, but the notion that a worldly Parisian is so estranged from the erotic universe is hard to swallow.

Anne (Binoche) is profiling a new sort of sex worker: college students who fund their education by turning tricks. Charlotte (Anais Demoustier) is a freckle-faced French gamine. Alicja (Joanna Kulig) is a buxom blonde from Poland. In interviews and flashbacks, both young women are philosophical about their customers, most of whom are married, middle-age and matter-of-factly perverse.

Be forewarned that director Malgorzata Szumowska is equally philosophical, depicting scatological sex acts in explicit detail.

We can tell from Anne’s trembling lips that the stories – and some tongue-loosening vodka – have an intoxicating effect on the reporter, whose home life with a ladder-climbing husband and a porn-surfing son is dry and demeaning. Yet her sensual awakening seems like something from 1970s suburbia, not a modern metropolis where Anne is supposed to be an esteemed professional.

“Elles” is provocative company, but it leaves us feeling hustled.