The Life
The Life
NR | 16 April 2004 (USA)
The Life Trailers

An anthropology student exploring the nature of prostitution is drawn deeper into that profession than she ever expected.

Reviews
Flyerplesys

Perfectly adorable

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Dorathen

Better Late Then Never

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Organnall

Too much about the plot just didn't add up, the writing was bad, some of the scenes were cringey and awkward,

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Aneesa Wardle

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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thesiouxfallskid

Part documentary and part fiction this film involves the world of prostitution. I give it plus points for interviews of substance which evidently are the real thing, minus points for the rather lame fictional parts, and minus a bit more for being rather thrown together. The film is connected with a book by Isabela Pisano, Yo Puta, which came out about same time on conversations with prostitutes. So apparently the driving force behind the film was Isabela Pisano, who as an actress in the late 70s starred in films as a prostitute, and who later as a journalist wrote a book Yo Terrorista and a biography on Yasser Arafat with whom she had some sort of relationship over a 12-year period. More about all this on Wikipedia and links you will find there. I do think that this film presents a very worthwhile, multifaceted view of prostitution. To its credit the film is more interviews than story.

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RResende

This was a complete waste of eventually useful ideas. I enjoy a filmmaker who tries to get out of the preconceived canons and ways to tell a story. Nowadays, the best cinematic essays one can find is on how to reformulate narrative devices and story telling, and in a second plan, visual renewed ideas. If the eye narrative is in conformity with the storytelling device, that's when we have great films.Here we have a work by someone who probably agrees with what i told above, but, at least in this try (second try, according to IMDb) was completely clumsy, useless, bad tasted. This is a terrible work, it pretended much, it tried to do things in an imaginative way, but the final work is a disaster, originated, i believe, in the lack of sensitivity of who worked this.So, we're being told a fictionalized narrative, multi layered. This means we have a great number of threads to follow (here associated with different prostitutes). The device used is the false documentary. In the middle of that assumed fakery, we have a fiction line, with Richards, Hannah and Almeida.The problem is how rigidly this construction is made, and how little imaginative it becomes in its development. I mean, the actresses playing prostitutes (i really suppose they were all actresses, i just had a doubt on one or two) are a complete cliché, someone sit down and thought "how many kinds of prostitutes, and prostitution motivations, and prostitutes social conditions ca i think of?". And that's it. We have the African black nymphomaniac, we have the Brazilian hot "sexual available" lookalike prostitute, we have the Latin American Indian descendant prostitute, we have the high class escort (who is french!), we have the male prostitute. We have those who like what they do, those who do it for money, and those who don't have other choice. So useless, so superficial, so boring, such a waste of time. There are such great examples on fake documentaries about half real realities ('F for Fake' being at the top of this list) that it is terrible that someone could do this like we see here. What's the point of portraying people that look like prostitutes, talk like several stereotypes of prostitution would talk, act like prostitutes, live like prostitutes, but are in fact actors? The question is: why not place real prostitutes and make a real documentary if there is no manipulation, no intention at all behind the fake documentary?Than, to conclude, the fiction story. An anthropology student, virgin, who is studying prostitution. Her neighbour is a prostitute and due to financial trouble, she comes to enter the job as well. What was the point? In the end, this developed as those common documentaries made for TV channels, History, Biography, Odisseia, etc. With an exception: with those documentaries, one can at least take valuable facts, if you don't know them, and if you like being distracted (i don't) you can rely on the awful fictional bits.The visual resolution of this is made in accordance to the uselessness of the story choices. Most of the way we have women detached from whatever the environment was where they were speaking, and pasted above the photograph of a cheap hotel where prostitution happens. Other times we have useless visual tricks, of deforming images, and highly saturated colours.My opinion: 1/5 avoid it.http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

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batzi8m1

I saw this on Showtime, just before the 147th showing of Spidergirl.This gives you an idea of what we're talking about here. T&A between interviews of Ho's Pimps and Gigolos from the legal trade.OK in the beginning they all talk like it's their choice and what they want. By the end they're whining about wanting to get out and have a normal family with kids and all that. Right down to the interview with the faceless Russian mobster talking about force, violence and keeping the passports to keep the girls working for them. All pure stereotype and nothing we haven't seen better before by real documentaries. Oh except they have flashy sexy sets from inside tacky euro-trash whorehouses complete with the red satin and mirrors.Denise Richards and Darryl Hannah provide the titillation to keep the viewer interested with one of those horribly lame plots like you get in soft core porn like the Red Shoe Diaries.A long time ago Umberto Eco wrote an essay on how to tell if you're watching a porno film. If the drive to the house takes way too long as a setup ... ie. if the fluff is just to fill time then that's what you got.Not the worst ... by far ... of porn producers trying to justify themselves.Personally Spiderbabe was much better.

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Zima Filippov

Many things could be said about this film - misleading, clichéd, style over substance, but in the end the most important aspect plays the decisive role: this film is boring.The authors decided to present the film as a pseudo-documentary, but instead the viewer is subjected to seeing poorly acted commentary dialogue about prostitution over and over again. Maybe that would be interesting if the commentary itself had at least a spark of originality, alas... Person after person, every participant in this unwatchable boring mess says nothing but stereotypical b.s. It is almost as if the filmmakers made their product for someone from Mars - someone who has never seen or even heard of a prostitute in their entire life!Oh, there is also Denise Richards in this movie. Yes. We all know that Denise Richards adds credibility to any movie! Seriously though, Richards and Daryl Hannah are in this film, but why they are here is anyone's guess. Their scenes could be easily taken out - they are not important. Well, in fact, the whole film is not important - just skip it altogether and watch something else.

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