A fresh look at landmark feminist film
The 4K restoration of “Working Girls” might be one of the key film events of 2021, as it is basically a rescue of a nearly lost 1986 feminist film about sex workers that was one of Miramax’s early successes.
Deservedly, it marks the return of director Lizzie Borden, one of the key figures of 1970s and ’80s New York feminist filmmaking. She plans to board a plane for the first time since the start of the pandemic to fly from her current home in Los Angeles to San Francisco to host a screening at the Roxie on Friday, July 9.
“‘Working Girls’ had shown at the Roxie years ago, and some of the sex workers I had done a panel with way back when will be there,” Borden said. “It’s kind of like a homecoming. It’s going to be cool.”
“Working Girls” takes a radical approach: Set during the course of a day at a Manhattan brothel, it looks at sex work as a job — one part of a patriarchal economic system, to be sure, but one in which women were in control. There’s sex, all right, but it’s hardly titillating.
“I figured guys that were coming in (to see the film) to get off were going to be disappointed really fast,” Borden said, with a laugh.
The film premiered at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, where it drew a standing ovation. A year later, it won a special jury prize at Sundance and was distributed by Miramax. Then, it dropped off the map. Borden said Miramax had lost all the prints, and it never gained a DVD release.
Now the Criterion Collection, UCLA Film and Television Archive, and Sundance Institute have combined for a 4K restoration, under Borden’s supervision, from the original 16mm negative. The result is gorgeous. The
film, which will finally get a Bluray/DVD release on Tuesday, July 13, seems as fresh, funny and moving as ever.
“When it came out, it was important because it was shocking for the public to see prostitution and sex workers portrayed in a way that doesn’t judge and stigmatize them,” said Carol Leigh, a.k.a. the Scarlot Harlot, the director of the Bay Area Sex Worker Advocacy Network and founder of the Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival who is slated to conduct a Q&A with Borden at the Roxie event. “Lizzie Borden is radical as a filmmaker and as a feminist . ... What she did has rarely been done.”
But how did a radical feminist come to make a film about prostitutes?
Borden, born Linda Elizabeth Borden in Detroit (she changed her name to Lizzie after the noted ax murderer as an act of rebellion), was making what would become “Born in Flames,” her 1983 feminist classic about a radical women’s group that tries to take over the United States. But during the stopandstart sevenyear filming process, she found out that some of her actors — many of them artists and theater professionals — were prostitutes on the side. It was the only way they could survive while working toward their dreams.
Fascinated, she began exploring a phenomenon she never knew existed: the middleclass brothel, where women living seemingly normal lives would host clients (businessmen, mostly) in an apartment or similar setting.
“There were women, some of whom I cannot mention because they were famous, who worked in this brothel,” Borden said. “For me, it was the idea that it was just one of the many things that women could do. I knew a woman who was a filmmaker who worked in a Xerox shop for 40 hours a week, and I knew filmmakers who were working in a brothel. I thought, ‘That’s really interesting.’ ... So it’s about economics, it’s about capitalism.”
In Borden’s view, the world is not so different now for women.
“I thought there would be equal pay between men and women. I thought women would have a bigger range of (highpaying) jobs,” she said, “but as it turns out, women who have a college education work jobs that don’t earn enough to pay their overhead.”
She also emphasized that, while the johns in “Working Girls” seem like a sad collection of men, she is not and was not antimale.
“The men are not the villains,” she said. “It’s really about the fact that sex in this country then and now is different from what this culture sells. This country sells romance and it sells marriage, but it’s not like the 1950s. That does not happen all the time.
“Still there’s this sexual impulse . ... People dated and had sex during the pandemic, which was a little bit scary. But sex is sex, and some sex workers I know worked during the pandemic, because strip clubs were closed and they took a lot of chances.”
Borden, whose only other feature was the 1992 thriller “Love Crimes,” which starred Sean Young and Patrick Bergin, also worked in television, directing episodes for ’90s erotic series “Silk Stalkings” and “Red Shoe Diaries,” among others.
Now she’s working on a film about a female abortionist battling misogyny in McCarthyera America that would act as the completion of a thematic trilogy after “Born in Flames” and “Working Girls.”
She also started editing an anthology of writings by strippers and sex workers that will act as a frontline report on sex work during the internet era, including the pandemic.
“There is a notion of empowerment there that wasn’t true many years ago,” Borden said. “That’s changing the idea of sex work. I think it is good because sex work isn’t going to go away.”