Working Girls

Director: Lizzie Borden

1986 / 93min / DCP

Following her breakthrough, Born in Flames, Borden produced this lesser-known but no less extraordinary study of female sex workers—including Ivy Leaguer lesbian Louise Smith, who’s hiding her job from her partner and her children—as they come and go in the East Side condo/bordello where they ply their trade for madam Ellen McElduff. Purging her treatment of the subject of all sensationalism and moral hysteria, Borden focuses on the businesslike, detached nature of transactions among the girls, as well as between them and their clients. An unflinching, honest, and disarmingly comic film, based on months of research into the milieu by Borden.