In the poster for Anahì Berneri’s Alanis (2017), the eponymous female protagonist (played by Sofia Gala) sits on a chair with her legs spread wide; her left hand rests on her bare thigh and in her right she holds a child to her breast. Alanis, with her hair tied back, her red tank top hiked up, looks straight into the camera. A wink to the Nursing Madonna, yes, but Alanis’s gaze isn’t downcast and there is none of the demureness or modesty of the Virgin here. Instead, what we see is the unabashed display of a sexualised body. The poster captures the tone of the film, which is a flaunting of womanhood, motherhood and a conscious overturning of the social expectations of shame and decency that govern the maternal body.
Alanis is the story of Maria, who has called herself Alanis. We never find out why she chose the name but one of her coworkers guesses that it’s “because of the singer”. She has moved to Buenos Aires from the provinces at twenty-three, begun working as a sex worker, and now has a one-and-a-half year old son called Dante (played by Gala’s own son, Dante Della Paolera). When the film begins, she is living with Gisela (Dana Basso), an elderly sex worker who doubles up as Alanis’s agent and is later arrested and charged for running a brothel. The landlord throws Alanis and Dante out of the apartment, leaving them stranded on the streets of Buenos Aires. The rest of the film documents how she comes into her own as a prostitute without Gisela’s direction.
While prostitution is legal under the Argentinian constitution, brothels and other means of organised prostitution are criminalised. Women can be sex workers legally but can’t be employed by pimps or brothels, leaving them at the mercy of exploitative and violent cops, with no union or laws to protect them. While under Gisela’s supervision Alanis was able to get work and evade arrest. Alanis is ultimately the story of a woman who stands at the intersection of contradictory laws that hold her body hostage. Her life becomes an ongoing process of activism as she insists on carrying out her profession even after losing Gisela and encounters with the police. Following Gisela’s arrest, Alanis is interrogated about her connection to her and her mobile phone is confiscated. As Alanis tries to operate solo, we witness the danger that comes with such work: the hard-wired aggression of the streets is encountered in her efforts to penetrate into different territories. Other sex workers are so protective of their areas (given the laws, of course) that they beat Alanis when they suspect her of trespassing. Berneri emphasises how the prostitution laws are always set up so as to ensure failure, putting Alanis in a situation when the only option that safeguards her – being in an organised brothel where other women look after her needs and comfort – is deemed illegal. Alanis pushes against these laws, subverting them by doing anything she thinks that will help her and Dante survive.
Prostitution, or sex work, is a contentious area within most mainstream feminist narratives. In order to mitigate problematic contradictions between the ideas of exploitation and free will, the profession is almost always portrayed in films and books as something that is coercive and therefore has to be overcome. For sex workers on film, the profession is always the last straw, the thing that they have to do to survive extreme poverty or violence, and they are then condemned for it. Within such narratives, the necessity of rehabilitating the penitent sex worker is expressed through a common trope in which their bodily immorality is compensated by their good-heartedness. Starting from the Book of Joshua’s Rahab to Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and most famously in Gary Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990), stories of “hookers with a heart of gold” are abundant and form the primary model on which most filmic depictions of sex workers are based.
In an interview given in 2011, Judith Butler made a radical objection to this argument, pointing out that “It’s one thing to be against coerced sexuality – I’m against coerced sexuality. I’m against coercion. I’m against rape – and it’s another thing to decide that prostitution is by definition coercive sexuality. That’s where we need to be careful because there are many women who enter into sex work who are actually making a living wage and who need greater protection and good medical care and some kind of retirement guarantees.” These are the kind of radical feminist politics that Berneri espouses: Alanis is not the creation of a male imagination and therefore does not need to be given a golden heart in order to be considered a whole human. Alanis is scarcely a loveable character and she turns down every opportunity of a more ‘respectable’ job. She doesn’t want to be redeemed: she wants to be a prostitute. For her, this is preferable to cleaning other people’s bathrooms or working as a live-in maid. The central focus of the film is Alanis’s fight to do what she wants. For her, it’s a job and the only job she can do. In a striking scene where Alanis is interrogated by a lawmaker in connection to Gisela’s arrest, she is asked what it is like to live with Gisela. She replies, “We both do our parts. We both work.” When asked who looks after Dante when the women work, Alanis replies by asking “Do you have children? Do you pay for a nanny or does your wife take care of them? You pay rent, right? With your job. Well, imagine. Me too.”
During the interrogation, Alanis is positioned opposite a mirror and she faces herself while answering the questions so that it’s almost like she’s talking to herself. Cinematically, mirrors are often used to signpost internal dialogue – the person looking into the mirror is looking into their soul and there’s a possibility that they won’t like what they see. In Alanis, mirrors are most generously used in the scene where Alanis has sex with a client in a cheap pay-by-hour hotel, where they make up the walls of the room. She looks forward into the mirror, at her own reflection in the garish red light, whilst the client rams into her, calling her “slut”, “whore” and “tramp”. She abuses him back with the choicest of names and it’s clear that Berneri sees no need for the transformation that cinematic mirrors promise. By this time, the audience has been so naturalised to her naked body that this does not feel like titillation: boredom is written across her face and we know this is just another tedious routine that she needs to act out before getting paid. Alanis is not a film about conscience or morality but about the insistence of a woman’s autonomy over her body. Her face, her body and her son – these are all that Alanis sees in the mirrors and are also all that really matters.
In another scene where undercover police officers try entering her apartment, she sits on the floor with her back against the door and pushes her legs against the opposite wall in order to keep the door from opening. When the Dominican sex workers beat her up for intruding into their streets, she picks herself up and walks into a public bathroom and cleans her wounds, indomitable. Alanis’s body refuses to be litigated upon, she fights to preserve its autonomy, and her life is underlined by a complete disregard for the laws made by men. In times when conservative governments are cracking down on reproductive freedoms and fighting over bodies of women, Alanis is a cry for women to demand back their autonomy. By choosing a sex worker’s body as a vehicle for this debate, Berneri is not only moving feminist activism beyond the walls of liberal academia, but is also advocating for an ‘organic’ feminism along the lines of Antonio Gramsci’s organic intellectual – a feminism that emerges by itself and out of the need to combat misogyny, but does so without the trappings of a society-decreed academic intellectualism. It is a feminism that moves over the binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the question of sex work and looks at the larger picture, where the central question is, “How do we protect the women who choose to do it anyway?”
Despite the filthy bathrooms, crowded roads and violence, there exists a sisterhood that always has Alanis’s back. Gisela, her ‘boss’, the ‘Madame’ of their little brothel, makes mashed potatoes for Dante and looks after him when she entertains clients. Her aunt, Andrea, takes her and Dante in, making space for them to sleep in her tiny shop. She buys new clothes for the baby, tries finding jobs for Alanis and throws a fit when she decides to leave. The brothel she finally enters is full of women who sit together, crack jokes, laugh loudly and mother Dante. The Women and Child Welfare representative who accompanies the cops that want to ‘rehabilitate’ Alanis is shown to be inept and distant, but there is a special, undefined bond between these women who operate on the fringes of society. This is as much their battle as it is Alanis’s. In a similar way, the most beautiful scenes of the film are when one is permitted to see beyond the performativity of Alanis – when she sheds all her masks and is back to being Maria. She spends time with Dante, talks to him, takes selfies, pouts at the mirror and feeds him – reclining like the Venus of Urbino, sprawled naked on her bed, checking messages on her phone. She is at once the Virgin Mary and Venus, the Madonna and the Whore – Maria, the world’s most celebrated mother and the most famous prostitute.
