Sightlines · reception

How Working Girls was received

1987 · Lizzie Borden · Working Girls on Sightlines

The arc

Released in 1987 to a marketing campaign that sold it as titillation and to critics who didn't know what to do with its deadpan matter-of-factness, it spent decades as a whispered-about rarity — then the 2021 Criterion restoration turned it into one of the great rediscoveries of that era, now routinely called the most honest film ever made about sex work.

What’s debated

The perennial debate: is its flat, demystified, clock-punching view of the brothel the whole radical point, or does the deliberate anti-eroticism keep viewers at arm's length — with a side argument about whether every later sex-work film (Pretty Woman very much included) flunks the comparison.

Its footprint

It's the ur-text of the 'sex work is work' conversation on film — the movie people reach for whenever the discourse flares up — and cinephiles can't describe it without invoking Jeanne Dielman, as the brothel movie that's really about labor, small talk, and waiting around.

Where it stands

A canon climber: once a semi-lost indie footnote to Born in Flames, now a Criterion-anointed Letterboxd favorite and a 'you must see this' of both feminist cinema and 80s American independents.

Did you know? Lizzie Borden has said Miramax — then run by Harvey Weinstein — marketed the film against her wishes as something salacious, selling her defiantly unsexy workplace study as if it were softcore; she's told the story pointedly in interviews ever since.

Named by the director

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — Borden has cited Akerman's film as the model for treating sex work as routine, repetitive labor observed in real duration.
• Chantal Akerman — Borden has named Akerman's de-dramatized, task-by-task depiction of women's work as a touchstone for the film's structure.