Whore

Ken Russell – 1991 – USA  
 

Not since Howard Hawks crafted Rio Bravo as a direct response to High Noon has there been such a famous case of a director making a film to expressly refute something he found reprehensible in a popular movie he'd had nothing to do with.  In this case, that film was the monster hit Pretty Woman (1990), an emblematic work of the 80s/90s Hollywood mentality and public taste.  Russell found it utterly absurd and dishonest, to a dangerous degree, since it promoted a notion of the “hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold” that was outdated and discredited even then.  Russell’s NC-17-rated Whore is the gritty, un-romanticized treatment of precisely the same subject.  Was this wise?  Politically, probably not, since such a film was not likely to be heralded by the same town that wasn’t even finished heaping praise on Garry Marshall and Julia Roberts at the time.  Aesthetically, though, it gave Russell a chance to do something far afield from what he was primarily known for; wacky, surreal horror-dramas like Gothic (1987) and Lair of the White Worm (1988).  Yes, his Crimes of Passion (1984) also dealt with prostitution in quite a direct way, and yes he could have merely referred people to this earlier film as a repudiation of Pretty Woman’s inanity.  But the bluntly named Whore was especially designed to be even coarser and more squalid, an almost play-by-play mockery of the bubbly cleanness of Pretty Woman.  If Russell’s tone was merely sarcastic, though, the film wouldn’t work – (and true enough, many feel it doesn’t); but on the contrary, he presents a distinct and multifaceted main character played by Theresa Russell (no relation).  She makes it clear that she was driven to prostitution out of desperation, is victimized by pimps and dangerous johns, and has no expectations of becoming a type of Cinderella who can seduce Richard Gere and get whisked off to a life of obscene affluence.  Theresa Russell’s down-to-earth, streetwise personality is all the more tragic because she seems so upbeat; she has no delusions and is remaining open to possibilities for rewarding human interaction by sheer force of will, not through romantic flights of fancy.  There is a grainy sloppiness to the shooting style and editing of the film that is very unusual in Russell’s feature work, but not unprecedented; (his earliest work was in British television, where he created many documentaries and dramatized bio-pics using a variety of audacious techniques).  Indeed, for all its flaws, Whore feels like a young man’s film; even though it’s always obvious why it did nothing to revive Russell’s flagging career.  Quite the reverse; after 1993’s Lady Chatterley, Russell never again made anything that produced the slightest blip on the radar of the film world.  Like Orson Welles, he ended up making eccentric films virtually single-handedly in his own home.