Student Services

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.

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.

IMHO there's a fair amount of commonality with "Slovenian Girl", although the type of naivety on show here is rather different, as Laura here is clearly supposed to be very intelligent in the conventional sense. She shares though the distinct air of not even pretending to give the guys a good time - which one would have thought was part of the "job", no matter how distasteful, exploitative, or unfair. In filmic terms, there's also an undramatic conclusion to both movies.

Where this is less convincing, however, was the financial aspect - quite apart from whether it is (was?) indeed possible for a student to survive in Paris given fees, bills and rent, even with a part-time job - once she *did* start earning money from prostitution it felt as if she was spending too much of the extra cash on inessentials, thus not fixing the original problem. Maybe the book makes this clearer, but if the underlying mission is to elicit sympathy for her position then this in my view was a missed opportunity.

Not a bad film, but not a comfortable watch.

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.

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.