FILM REVIEW: SPECIAL TREATMENT

Mind games

By Ed Rampell

Jeanne Labrune’s Special Treatment is in the tradition of Luis Bunuel’s 1967 disturbingly dark psychological look at prostitution, Belle de Jour. Unlike the youthful, preternaturally beautiful Catherine Deneuve’s prostitute in the latter, Isabelle Huppert -- an acclaimed French actress who has been a fixture on the cinema scene since the 1970s -- plays an over-the-hill hooker in Special Treatment. The specialty, so to speak, of her character, Alice Bergerac, is not so much in the physical pleasuring of her johns, but in role playing. Wigs, costumes, props, S&M, naive schoolgirl personas, scenarios and the like form the basis of Alice’s Kama Sutra technique.

What makes director/co-writer Labrune’s work especially intriguing is the film’s witty parallels to that other type of “treatment”: psychoanalysis. Alice’s sessions with her clients are intercut with the likewise high priced, 50-minute “hours” psychoanalysts have with their patients -- the call-girl’s form of therapy compared to that of the analysts’ “talking cure.” The role of the dominatrix is likened to that played by the analyst.

No shrinking violet, Alice goes on to have encounters with a variety of shrinks, including Xavier Demestre (Bouli Lanners), an overweight, overwrought, middle-aged  psychoanalyst experiencing marital problems with Helene (Valerie Dreville), who also seems to be in the psychiatry racket (uh, I mean profession). Xavier’s midlife crisis leads to his meeting Alice.

Although Special Treatment is about sexuality, it is not especially sexy, with little nudity and no steamy erotic scenes. It is more of a meditation on what makes people tick, sexually and otherwise. What motivates Alice and her johns, Xavier and his patients? Why does Alice do what she does and what does the 40-something whore want to do with the rest of her life? While Alice appears to be a free agent without a pimp or brothel exploiting her, she ultimately comes across as a sex slave of sorts, even if she is imprisoned by herself, instead of by organized crime. Alice Bergerac’s name is probably intended as a play on Cyrano de Bergerac, the lover of over endowed schnoz fame noted for using ruses when it came to romance.