In the new film from Vatel (2000) director Jeanne Labrune, Isabelle Huppert plays Alice, a prostitute who specialises in role-play. Diffident, practical, and self-reliant, she’s a character who appears at first to be a role model of a certain kind of independent woman. Even her 'practice’ eliminates the need for third party involvement; her professional assignations come from reliable referrals and the 'meetings’ take place in rented domiciles of her own choosing.
Special Treatment, though, is not quite a sympathetic film portrait of the idiosyncratic work style of a 'strong woman’ who happens to be a prostitute that it first appears to be. In fact, Labrune and co-writer Richard Debuisne have constructed a subtle and slow-burn low key drama about a character that is quietly but definitely coming apart. Alice’s actions, her rather brittle disposition and remote attitude, mask a fragility that is carefully revealed. It’s a film that takes its time and that makes big demands; it was not until the movie was at least 40 minutes in that I had a strong fix on what the film was doing. But getting to that moment of revelation was riveting, perplexing and at times quite funny.
Alice’s slow motion breakdown is juxtaposed with Xavier (Bouli Lanners, another great French veteran actor), a shrink who is undergoing emotional torment. Where Labrune hides Alice’s true nature, she boldly announces Xavier’s conflicts and desires from the get-go. Unhappily married to another therapist, played by Valerie Dreville, who hits all the right notes for anguish and sympathy, Xavier falls in an emotional heap soon after she boots him out of home. Ultimately he meets Alice. So the film becomes an ironic parable about how these two professionals, both deeply damaged, assist the other in healing their respective wounds so they can move on.
Working with cinematographer Virginie Saint-Martin, Labrune has come up with a cool style that mixes a 'you are there’ doco visual attitude – a mobile camera and natural light, unflattering for the actors – with a very formal use of wide lenses. In Special Treatment, as in life, we’re very conscious of space, and say the mood of a specific room, or an office, or wherever. It’s a visual style that gives the film a sense of lived experience and it takes the exotic, almost theatrical edge, off the early scenes where Alice 'performs’ for her clients. Since most of the characters here are either remote or a little wigged out they’re hard to know (liking or not liking them hardly comes into it) so Special Treatment is a real actors challenge; Huppert and Lanners are both fine in tricky, tough roles but it’s Debuisne who really impresses as a doctor who offers Alice something she most needs: a sympathetic ear and a sense of clarity.
Special Treatment has an open handed matter of fact sensibility when it comes to both mental health and prostitution; subjects that traditionally, in film at least, fall prey to a lot of attitudinising and bad faith, glamourising and romanticising. Special Treatment isn’t an easy film; it’s slow, and it’s as harsh and mercurial as its characters. But at least it’s interesting and hard to dismiss mostly because its attitude to people and their issues – emotional, professional, and everything – seems honest and no holds-barred real. These days, in an age of movies where all answers seemed programmed and vetted by self-help manuals, that’s really something.
