Word: courtesan
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...film follows the lonely young singer and seamstress into the life of a courtesan, a job she's not particularly suited to. She meets a rich gentleman farmer, Etienne Balsan (the marvelous Benoît Poelvoorde), and follows him to his château outside Paris, drawn by a lack of other alternatives and a desire to get closer to Paris. She offers herself physically but without any indication that she is interested in the act from a personal perspective. Her only attempt to ingratiate herself is in learning how to ride Etienne's beloved horses, and even then...
...relative scale of courtesan keepers, Etienne is a kindly boss, although he never lets Coco forget her place. When he attempts to send her away, she refuses. She's tenacious but never tender. Early in the movie, she makes the pronouncement that a "woman in love is like a begging dog" and she sticks to it, until Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola, giving off the vibe of a young Daniel Day-Lewis) comes along. He introduces her to great books and the notion that she is exceptional. "You're elegant," he says, and with him, for what seems like the first...
...scene in Stephen Frears' Chéri, an aging courtesan named Lea, nude but for a sheet, is lying next to her lover. "You are so beautiful," he murmurs. Given that Fred, whose nickname is Chéri, is 30 years her junior and has been sponging off her for six years, the compliment could be construed as part of his job description. But Lea is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, so the young man isn't sucking up - he's just stating the obvious...
...points out, a good body does last a long time. So can a good face. But the undercurrent of what she's saying is that nothing lasts forever. She first gets involved with the 19-year-old Chéri, the indolent son of another highly successful retired courtesan (Kathy Bates) because she enjoys his youth and beauty (with his cheekbones and Cupid's bow of red lips, he looks as though he could be her in men's clothing). She tells her masseuse that she can't complain about Chéri's character, because she's not sure...
Somewhere between low-brow movies and art-house fare is a sweet spot occupied by films that explore weighty subjects while still managing to entertain in a populist sense. Indonesian director Nia Dinata hit that spot in 2002 with Ca-bau-kan (The Courtesan), which looked at Chinese-Indonesian identity during the republic's early years. Since then, she has directed two more films, Arisan! (The Gathering, 2003) and Berbagi Suami (Love for Share, 2006), and co-directed another, Perempuan Punya Cerita (Chants of Lotus, 2007). Each one depicts subjects rarely discussed in Indonesian society, such as homosexuality and polygamy...