Memoirs of a French Whore (1979)

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Absolutely Fantastic

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

A girl, Marie (Miou-Miou) is led into prostitution by her pimp boyfriend, Gerard (Daniel Duval). She must not only give money to him but to the gangsters that explore him as well. Marie, together with a friend, Maloup (Maria Schneider), will try to become independent. They start to work the streets on their own but they will meet physical and sexual violence. They return to the brothels, and Marie goes back to her pimp, but Gerard has his caprices and wants more and more – he's in a spiral downwards and he's leading Marie with him. There's seems to be no escape. "La Derobade" is a grim film – it shows the streets, the city scum and the violence that is an ever-constant threat to the girls who work the streets. It's a sad life. The film is based on the memoirs written by Jeanne Cordelier. Miou-Miou is Marie - her acting is nothing short of luminous. And the musical score gives the film a reflexive, melancholic tone. "La Derobade" is unique in the genre – it is at the same time poetic and realistic. A neglected gem that deserves more recognition.

there are two kinds of whore, nature whore and forced whore, the former kind prevails,there is no cut rated whores I think. forced one is not whore morallythe message of the film is kind like being a whore isn't bad,what's bad is being a tool of males...so guess I cannot agree with the director, the duvall guy might have huge experience in whores, but he couldn't give more useful info than a ten years old.not the worst film about sex, routine for my huge film collection and daily viewing.

I first saw this disturbing film at one of our local art galleries that also screened all of the new independent & foreign films that our local multi screen cinemas wouldn't touch with a ten foot projector. The story deals with a young woman under the spell of love with her new boyfriend who has a slimy,scummy undercurrent (read that as a pimp). Over the period of a few short years, she is transformed into a street wise,hardened hooker. We are treated to sequences of her dealing with some of the worst street scum. If it were not for the top drawer performances of it's cast, I would easily pass this off for smarmy soft core porn, but for some reason, Miou Miou seemed to charm her way into my heart (and my sympathy). 'La Derobade' (known in the U.S.as 'Memoirs Of A French Whore')may not be everybody's cup of tea,but the strong of heart will find some relevance in it.

I hope I can say this and stay within IMDb guidelines, but this is not a very nice film, despite its pretensions to Bresson or Fassbinder. It purports to tell a harrowing story from its female protagonist's point of view - a woman prostituted by her boyfriend becomes both a slave and one of the damned in an inescapable man-made hell - but all the time violence on women is fetishised and exploited, while that on men is chastely elided. It is the duty of filmmakers to expose repression and corruption, not collude in it.