Special Treatment (Sans Queue ni Tête )

My first French film at the HKIFF this year is Special Treatment Sans Queue ni Tête ( literally With neither tail nor head) . Directed and written by Jeane LaBrune and starring Isabelle Huppert as Alice Bergerac, a high class prostitute and Bouli Lanner as Xavier Demestre, a psychoanalyst, the director seems to want to explore certain similarities between this oldest and new profession of the 20th century. 

Both a prostitute and a psychoanalyst deal with people's needs, desires and frustrations, sexual in one case and emotional in the other. In the film, for one reason and another both are unhappy doing what they are doing. Alice has to pretend to be whatever her clients wants her to be, a doll, a domestic servant, a school girl, a lesbian, a sexual task master, a mother or a pure whore. Xavier on the other hand, who is despised by his wife, has to listen to all kinds of his clients' complaints and pains and be their emotional trash can or spitoon. Whilst one hires her body out for use by her clients, the other hires out his ears, his professional sympathy and his time for the use of his clients. Sometimes, his client through talking about their own problems, will arrive at certain insight but often will not improve. Both of them love art and both would go to art auctions from time to time. Both have got their rules and charging rates. For Alice, there are different rates for straight sex, mere time without actual sex, extra services like dressing up, sex involving different parts of her and her client's bodies.

The film starts with various scenes in which we see how each serves their clients and how, feeling frustrated and lonely because of his failing marriage, Xavier wants to seek relief through sex with a whore but feels too inhibited to do so. However, he got Alice interested,  after a traumatic experience from a particularly demeaning sadistic client, in finding a solution for her own problem of not wanting to be a professional hooker any more. She hunts for different psychoanalysts, tries them out for a fitting and eventually found a psychiatrist who found out how strong psychologically she really was and  that what she needed was not to find a psychological help to ease her transition from ceasing to be a hooker but a job. He gave her a name card. It is the name of an art dealer, because she studied art at university.

The film is full of subtle ironies. I like the scene in which Alice enumerates the types of services she renders with truly brief and to the point "professional" description. complete with differential charging rates, mode of payment and even default payment terms to the hapless and hypocritical and inhibited Xavier about his intended 10 "sessions" with her, during  their first free exploratory appointment at a hotel lobby and also the dramatic irony when Alice was being taken care of by a mentally retarded patient when she visits the busy psychiatrist at the mental institution where he works. I also like another scene in which one of Xavier's own clients remarks how sad he looks and decides to make a fool of him by pretending to have forgotten to bring money and expecting Xavier to say that it does not matter and after Xavier has said what he expected him to say, albeit with fuming with a barely suppressed rage, then telling Xavier that that was his last session with the psychoanalyst and that he would never return again!

The dialogues are superbly written, full of wit and humor. As always Isabelle Huppert excels as the intelligent high class professional prostitute and portrays well the strictly professional and the almost mechanical alacrity in the way she changes her wig, her dress, her talk to suit the different kinds of roles her client wants her to play in the make-belief world of their sexual fantasy.  It is a truly amazing and devastating dig at the psychoanalytic profession! I would give it a 2A.