Thanks to her utterly worthless husband, Diane (Lineke Rijxman) turns to sex work in order to support her child. She befriends Dora (Henriëtte Tol), a gal who’s been in the game a long time, and the two of them slowly develop a bond to protect each other from the johns, the pimps, and their catty (and sometimes cruel) co-workers at a very busy brothel. Meanwhile, a serial killer is abducting women from the streets and holding them in a cellar for his sick and twisted games.
Broken Mirrors (1984) from director/writer Marleen Gorris came out of nowhere for me, mainly because I know virtually nothing about cinema from the Netherlands. The film provides an honest and unflinching look at the gross and grubby realities of sex work while managing to humanize its female characters. Even the ladies with the more challenging personalities are fascinating. The men, however, are all trash. At best, they are banal, but at worst, they are extremely dangerous. When one of the ladies defends a creepy john by saying, “But what if he is one of the nice ones?” Her colleague responds, “If he was nice, he wouldn’t be visiting a brothel!”
A movie this bleak needs a bleak music score, and Broken Mirrors has got it! The glassy sounds of composer Lodewijk de Boer’s digital synthesizer adds to the coldness of the wintry setting and the isolation of the characters. The cinematography is sharp and lovingly captures the garish colors of the brothel, but then switches to a desaturated look when the serial killer is on the prowl to seemingly signal to the viewer that something terrible is going to happen.
Broken Mirrors is a wildly depressing portrait of everyday life in a brothel mixed with a twisted serial killer thriller. These intertwining stories present a disturbing rumination on how a male-dominated society, even one where prostitution is legalized, treats sex workers (and women at large) like playthings to be cruelly dismantled and thrown away when men grow tired of them. To keep the film from being utterly hopeless, the main characters begin to assert themselves in, at first, subtle, and then in bold ways to hold onto their sanity, but how long can they maintain a sense of self in a world that wishes to crush them for even the smallest acts of defiance?
Cult Epics absolutely rocks this release of Broken Mirrors. Occasionally in some darker scenes, the film grain pulses a little bit, but other than that, everything looks and sounds excellent. There is an audio commentary from author and film scholar Peter Verstraten, who provides a great deal of background on this film and is extremely knowledgeable about Dutch cinema. There’s a very cool archival interview from a Dutch talk show with sex worker and activist Margo St. James. The disc also features a promotional gallery and trailers.