The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, or What happens to the old whore ?

We usually see the other end of this life, the teenager / twentysomething taking a lot of random cock and washing it down with as much psychoactive anything as she can get her hands on. The nude & table dancing life of the party, the bane of any and all failed women, cowering on their couch in fear of their own feminity. "Anyone can be a woman", their whimpering goes, "what's really hard is failing to be a woman, spending your time doing anything but". Perhaps, but that's no good reason to be stupid. For that matter, [almost] anyone can drive a car sitting in the driver seat, what's really hard is to drive the car seated in the trunk. So what of it ?

So what happens to the whore after thirty ? Some don't make it, obviously, and perhaps they're the fondest memory of the whole lot. Some try to keep at it, forever, indefinitely. Sometimes this almost works, sometimes it veers into the ridiculous ditch, sometimes they slowly fade into a life of whore trainers, with a substitute family of sorts composed of their own youthful replicas. And sometimes they get married.

How does that go ? I told a story once, incidentally illustrated with Belluci's bosom. I know a few more. This filmⁱ tells another passible possible story.

It glosses over the substance of the thing, the girl's previous profession, the actual high mark of her life under the flimsy pretext that "she doesn't remember anything". You know that old joke, "if you remember the 60s you weren't there" ? A cop out pareil, piously but fraudulently serving the expectations of a society decaying under barbarian pressure. To also satisfy the director-screenwriter's own ideological needs, there's some spurious lesbianism inserted in there, as if. But the viewer can always ignore the nonsense, wipe the slag and carry on.

The story as such is quite reasonable, except in that one part where she finds the towel. I was fully expecting a very sporting, and very curious "oh wow really ?! where is she ? let's see what you've hunted, bro" out of her, and for that matter the text and the situation did as well. Miller's too scared to deliver. Otherwise, yes, this is the life of the old whore. Provided she didn't manage to get herself killed, and she didn't get fixated on it, provided she found a good man, older than her of course, with money of course. And she can cook and she can raise children, of course (provided she didn't do monthly abortions for half a decade) and well... she can keep her calm, and understand a lot about the world around her.

Understand a lot about the world around her with that very peculiar slant of observation characteristic of the working girl, a specific, sweet mixture of practicality and sensuality. "That gentleman would be docile as a lamb if you just feed him", she says echoing the experience of Kim Novak's character with that gaggle of accountants ; "that other just needs to be praised and a finger in the rectum as he comes" she says of your average, run of the mill serious businessman, clearly belabouring to hide an inferiority complex under the too short coat of a superiority one. She knows things, a specific list of things, and I know how she knows them, the only way one gets to know them. But the producers figure you won't know, and so it's reasonably safe to show you something you otherwise shouldn't see.

Enjoy. It's you know... just one of those things.

1. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, 2009, by Rebecca Miller, with Monica Bellucci, Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and a bunch of Bs and nobodies that somehow crowd the billing for incomprehensible reasons. [↩]