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Mes chères etudes – Student Services – CATCH IT (B-) Based upon Mes chères études (My expensive studies in English) is a 2008, an autobiographical book by an anonymous author known as "Laura D.", who is a modern language student at a Paris university. The book has drawn national attention in France with its controversial contents, in which the author claimed that she had to go into prostitution to financially support her studies. (Wiki) French movies are sexually expletive and they don't hesitate in holding back. This goes for this one as well. It's at times very disturbing a young girl doing things with old man, getting raped, message or just lying naked. Anyways Déborah François did a great job because it didn't occur to me for a second that she is just an actress. The thing about the movie I didn't like that it's slow and spend too much time in the bedroom at times.

Under the title "Student Services", I watched this film, not realizing it was a made-for-TV-movie based upon a true story.

The actress who portrays the main character, Laura, acquits herself fine. She plays a college student who has trouble paying her bills, so she turns to adult on-line ads to find meet men who will pay her for sexual favors.

The film is not erotic. Laura, for the most part, detests what she does.

The film may have been designed to put forth a political point of view--that too many students have financial problems, so they turn to illegal activities. Someone who lives in France might understand a political solution to this French problem, but others probably will not.

It is certainly no documentary. And it does not try to be.

As a drama, it offers little that is new to the genre, and Laura's path is marked by detours and confusing behavior, defusing the drama.

This French movie is based on a supposedly autobiographical story about a young and incredibly naive university student (Deborah Francois) who has to resort to prostitution to pay for her studies. This movie certainly doesn't glamorize prostitution from the female perspective as the girl's johns are presented as decidedly unattractive, pathetic, and borderline dangerous. It kind of DOES, however, tend to glamorize prostitution from the male perspective as Deborah Francois ("The Page Turner", "Female Agents") is very attractive and spends half the movie in various stages of undress. Moreover, she is (often pretty unbelievably) sweet and naive and probably nowhere near as cynical and hard-bitten as the kind of person who would be working as a prostitute in real-life. I'm sure most of the potential male audience of this movie can't honestly say they are watching this purely out of social concern that gorgeous but financially strapped French co-eds might be turning to prostitution (at least I know I can't).

There's always a danger in a film that, on one hand, is this sexually explicit, but is also, on the other hand, trying to generally condemn the sex trade. They've actually made a few films like this in America recently. "About Cherry" (with another unbelievably gorgeous model/actress, Ashley Hinshaw) runs into the same problems as this one. But both are vastly preferable to "On the Doll" where the decidedly PG-13 content manages to add to an already ridiculous and laughably unbelievable "expose" content. Only the obscure recent American indie film "Smile Pretty" successfully manages to be bold enough to tackle this kind of touchy subject without being so explicit as to slip into exploitation itself.

I certainly DON'T want to take anything away from Francoise, however, who is quite good in this (and it's certainly not HER fault she's far more naturally beautiful than any real prostitute probably would be). I don't know is she speaks English well, but if so she certain has the talent to compete with most young Hollywood actresses (who would never be brave enough to tackle a sordid role like this). She could be the next Marion Cotillard (who tackled a number of French films like this before becoming a rising star in Hollywood), or at least the next Ludivine Sagnier (a big star in France who has occasionally been successful outside it). She is definitely one to watch.

AKA: STUDENT SERVICES.

The story of the coed who has to compromise her values and sell herself to get by is not a new one. But here it is told with a certain vive and lifted by the lead Deborah Francois. Yes, she is lovely naked and spends a great deal of the film undressed, but it serves the plot well as she moves among men she meets online. She finds some encounters titillating, but finds most repulsive either in the moment or on reflection. After an innocent foray into selling her company, posing for photos and quickie sex, she gets gets in deeper, kinkier and caught up in a cycle from which she struggles to escape.

Laura is a complex character: She wants to earn money and she doesn't feel guilty to offer sex. However, she doesn't really enjoy the moments with their clients, especially with whom she doesn't like. From the moment she is being ripped off (i.e. Clients fail to pay, clients force her to perform some sexual acts she doesn't want), she is somehow regretful about doing it. In the final scene where she takes off her glasses and wig then smiles, showing who she really is. She is kinda showing us that she is glad she is no longer a sex worker, and she didn't make a bad choice to be a sex worker. She didn't choose to run away, instead, she embraces it and lives with it.

Perhaps if she wasn't a sex worker in the first place, she would't discover who her bf really was and how amazing her life would be without him. Study, work, and life. Husbands, boyfriends, they might just haul you somehow. Perhaps if she didn't choose to come to Paris after the bad experiences while being a sex worker, she would't recover it from her nightmare. Everything happens when it is supposed to.

The movie is a bit strange and portrays the girl as very naive It starts out with a student fainting in class, turns out she haven't been eating in a while cause of poor economy, from there on the main story starts. After seeking advice from what I believe is the school Counsellor whom basically tell her to sue her parents or get more jobs. Than she somehow get the idea of trying prostitution. (At this point I sort of miss and explanation as to why she choose it so fast) It supposed to be a one time thing, but soon she spends all the money and she need to do it all over again. You get to see how she spends her hard earned money, while she's spending them. Dinner out with her friends paying for their drinks etc All the while you get to see these small cash signs in the air with a price tag of what the item cost her, It was and interesting way to illustrate how money just fly away sometimes. When you've been broke for a log time, you often fantasies about what you gonna spend all the money on when you get on the up and up. But once you get there you soon realize easy come easy go. So soon she needs money again and one client leads to another and another and so on and so forth. One thing that struck me as odd though, was that with every client she usually just lay there like a corpse while they do their thing. I may not know much about prostitution and the life of the average hooker, but I assume when you pay for sex you want some spark in it, however fake that spark must be. I'm pretty sure nobody pays a hundred Euros for a girl to lay there playing dead while you hammering away at her. Not unless you got some weird fantasy about them being dead, I'm pretty sure they would expect her to fake it at least Also the average client was usually men in their 50; it would have been nice with some diversities Another odd thing with the main character is that she seems to get more stupid/naive for each client she takes on. Which is usually quite the opposite of what normally happens in that line of work There are also bits and pieces that doesn't really go anywhere, which is a bit confusing But all in all not a bad movie,

It's one of most important movies I've ever seen. I thought it would be about horny girl, who wants to get some extra money. Trailer, honestly, doesn't put a good picture what this movie is about. On the other hand, maybe it's because it wants to attract average audience to the truth about prostitution and not just people, who feel concerned about different social issues.

I think the film is done really well in meaning it pictures all nuances of prostitution very precisely and realistically without getting too heavy psychologically. It's not a thriller or erotica, it's just a story of life of one girl, who took a decision to try out prostitute services. What's important, she's smart, and sees things not through the lenses of a young naive girl, but someone with in-depth outlook on this job.

I definitely recommend it for everyone, who wishes to know, what prostitutes actually go through.

Deborah Francois I must say, is one of the sexiest girls to get her gear off. Her sexy and magical presence is worth the view alone. SS is an enjoyable film, for that fact, but we've been around this course, many a stories before (Slovenian Girl, 2010's Girls, or loosely the Aussie offbeat Sleeping Beauty- 2011). This is a tasty film which really works with, or relies on the scenes with uni hottie Laura, (Francois) making ends meat, by becoming a private escort and companion, through the internet, with a middle aged, enigmatic and menacing regular, Joe. The more demanding or weird he gets, the more dangerous aura we feel around the guy, where we fatally see a path for Laura that won't end well here. He pays her good, but they come with a price. He has some sick tastes, none more than an orgy scene with some dirty repulsive types, near the end, he sets up. At first Laura, thinks the service will just be a one off, but like a candy to a baby, she's get sucked into this business, which has us pondering, does she keep doing it, cause she enjoys it, or is purely for the money. The answer is both, she just doesn't want to admit she enjoys it. In short bits, we see her service other men, one a corpulent, background middle aged guy, where they share a slow moving dance, that scene kind of becomes humorous. One scene earlier in, has a client who picked her up at a bar, get dangerous. But really the film focuses on Laura and Joe's interludes. I mean does she like this guy, or seek a kind of friendship from him. The film doesn't really cut deeper than that, where honestly, I preferred a darker ending instead of the unsatisfying one I got here which really slumped. Seeing Francois in the raw, is one hell of a privilege, and she stokes up the screen. Here's another of these foreign flicks, with frank nudity, some of them dangerous, push bounds scenes, and if you're in the mood for a tasty dirty foreign flick, SS like 2004's Greek title, Hardcore will satisfy sexual hungry appetites.

If you are a girl who does not have any fun in life and wants to enjoy life at the right time (just wants to have a passionate & desiring moment and does not want to miss it) and not have the "the time that I should have done it is now gone" moment then you should watch this movie because it is racy, steamy and really good. The movie is not normalizing prostitution and in fact in love there is not age limit. The whole movie is about a girl and a 57 year old man who have a very passionate love just like the movie obsession. This movie and obsession are almost similar and they are both very good movies.

One finds out Laura is really relating her story of what she has to do to make ends met as a student. She is a language student, and in class, she collapses. It seems she wasn't eating enough, and she wasn't eating because she had no money. She shares a place with Manu, but the expenses became greater than she was originally told. She starts to look for jobs, and finds one that intrigues her at a decent payment. It is with Joe, a gym teacher, who simply wants to be with a young, pretty and naked girl. He seems nice, and pays well, but some of the other meetings with others do not go well, and she is raped. In telling Manu that she got raped just to pay the rent resulted in her leaving him in disgust, since he didn't care. She meets another student who is studying languages, and helps her out and she finds he really cares about her. But the idea of where her money comes from wears on him, and he becomes jealous and he starts to follow her. She leaves him, goes to Paris, but the higher costs there really cause problems, as no one wants to hire a student, as they want a person full time, and she wants her degree. So will this put her into a cycle she wants to escape from? The movie doesn't pull any punches. There are advantages and disadvantages to her in getting money, yet she cannot live without money. Some of the money she makes comes easily, and some comes at a terrible toll on her. It is not really erotic, just matter of fact and about survival. But can she break free of the cycle? Déborah François as Laura sells the movie.