While at ConGregate last month, I had a quiet stretch in my room in the early morning and wound up watching GABY (1956), which though I didn’t know it was a remake of Waterloo Bridge.
Leslie Caron plays the eponymous protagonist, a French dancer who fled the Nazi occupation to London after the death of her parents. John Kerr is Greg, an American GI who’s never met anyone so elegant and sophisticated and falls for her like a ton of bricks. Before long, vows are exchanged; I assumed that having married in haste, the drama would come when they repented at leisure (Gaby’s parents are alive and Vichy or something equally shocking). Wrong. After Greg apparently dies on D-Day Gaby, currently unemployed, turns to sex work to support herself. When Greg returns, injured but alive, Gaby is to guilty to live and walks out into a German V-2 rocket bombardment.
Admittedly I wasn’t paying close attention to the film — it’s not that gripping and I was doing other stuff during parts of it — but I was surprised to realize Gaby was selling her body rather than just sleeping around. Maybe it was me not paying attention but it’s possible the Production Code forced the filmmakers to keep things much less obvious than in Waterloo Bridge, especially as Gaby doesn’t pay for her life for her sins. Instead Greg tells her that war is hell, people do terrible things — but it’s over now, let’s put it behind us. “I thought all Americans were divorced?”
My serial watching of Stephen Soderbergh came to a halt when I couldn’t find 2009’s THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE anywhere streaming. Finally, though, I ordered the DVD. This is one of Soderbergh’s art films (as opposed to crowd-pleasers like Ocean’s Eleven), with porn star Sasha Grey playing a sex worker dealing with men ranging from her slightly jealous live-in boyfriend to a client who might be more to various clients who want to give her advise on investing or better design for her website. As Roger Ebert says, most of them are buying sex but what they really want is to be told how smart they are.
The book Marked Women has a whole chapter on “prostitute as businesswoman” films. These include left-wing critiques showing how capitalism corrupts even sexual relations and those that show sex work is simply work, a job like any other. This film definitely fits the second category: Grey’s character is a businesswoman and her business is considerably safer because she runs it through the Internet (something Samantha Cole brings up in How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex). Overall, I liked the film, though while I agree with Soderbergh not diving deep into her motives (as he says on the commentary track, it’s too easy to go cliched), the result is that it never gets below the surface of her life. “I’ve told them I can’t make the junket to Vegas.”
All rights to images remain with current holders.
