Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

There's a fine line between art and trash, between demonstration and exploitation, between film and pornography, etc. As far as this charade goes, it matters not whether that line is a mile thick as ELLES is so clearly in the trash & exploitation category that it cannot even see that line - thick or thin. Nope, there is no "grey" area or overlap between artistic merit and seedy junk. The poor-deprived-misunderstood young girls we are encouraged to see are best observed as vapid, shallow unscrupulous opportunists. One, with vodka inspired rationale, is able to compromise her john pissing into her mouth by the sing-along session shared thereafter. The other, naive, stupid or both, seems genuinely shocked when danger arrives in the form of sodomy. But even more unforgiving is our heroine. Let's see, the investigator/officer/reporter goes underground and -surprise!- becomes sympathetic/understanding/intrigued/influenced by his/her underworld subjects. Nope never been done before, excepting maybe a few hundred times. Pardon my sarcasm. I tried hard to find some merit in ELLES, and I mean that sincerely. I'd have been better off just enjoying the fellatio and sadism. That's all we have here.

It's a film based around a journalist writing an article about student prostitution and her life as a housewife and it touches on the lives of two prostitutes. It's a strangely intimate story complemented by beautiful music and very erotic scenes. Miss Binoche is superb with all her usual beautiful nuances and command of the screen. It's a film about the universe of a woman's soul and it's rather compelling. I thought it was great and it lingers with you, its inconclusive and that makes you draw your own conclusions, so the film will be different for everyone. I drew we are all alone and no-one really knows us.

The mainstream middle-class person decides to investigate some aspect of demi-monde living, in this case prostitution, and finds herself being caught up in its irresistible fascination and reconsidering how she views her own identity. Did the filmmakers really think that there was something here that an audience hadn't seen before? With minor variations it's been done with murder, mental illness, gambling and drug addiction -- a half-dozen such films come to mind easily -- not to mention alternate lifestyles that may not be wrong in themselves but are nonetheless labeled "fringe-dwelling," so what exactly is new here?Juliette's character says she doesn't drink, but suddenly relents and shortly afterward is drinking everyone else under the table. Someone at the production end apparently just assumed that he/she understood the teatotaler's mindset and had the character flip abruptly on a moral resolve of this magnitude. If, rather, the character is a recovering problem drinker or even alcoholic, should not this little character detail have taken priority in what's really wrong with her life?Fantasy sequence where main character imagines herself surrounded by all the male customers described by the prostitutes she interviewed is blatant and way too concrete.One could call the film character-driven perhaps: that these actors in these roles seem to have plausibility in being family and/or forming friendships. If the film were genuinely about something the audience needed to see then these would be the actors we'd like to hire.

According to some reports, great many female students in France financed their studies from prostitution. This film starts from this report. Juliette Binoche plays the journalist who interviews two of these girls. Many times.She tries to analyze it all from a cold professional view, but finds that she is the one who changes and maybe also gets analyzed. The girls tell her they are abused sometimes, but Binoche is the one who takes the biggest injuries.Interesting film about "Western morals" declining more and more in all ways, since we're not interesting in sharing profits like we used to. But the film is a little cold and and analyzing, just like a professional journalist should be.