Film review: Irina Palm

Published on Thursday 24 July 2008 20:00

IRINA PALM (15) *

DIRECTED BY: SAM GARBARSKI

STARRING: MARIANNE FAITHFULL, JENNY AGUTTER, MIKI MANOJLOVIC

YOU'LL have to be a pretty big fan of Marianne Faithfull to buy into this woeful British drama, which finds the 1960s icon playing a penniless widow who becomes embroiled in the sex industry to pay for an expensive medical procedure to save her dying grandson.

Director Sam Garbarski, working from a terribly written and dubiously plotted script by Martin Herron and Philippe Blasband, may shoot for kitchen-sink realism, but his fabricated vision of the sex industry as a world where frumpy women like Faithfull's Maggie can earn big bucks giving hand-relief to desperate men through a glory hole leaves a lot to be desired. It's bad enough that the attempts to illustrate the matter-of-fact way sex workers approach their jobs are often unintentionally laughable – just check the way Maggie, whose stage name supplies the title, performs her duties dressed as if she were going to work on a factory floor 40 years ago. But when the film suggests that her newfound talent leads to increased confidence and potential romance, as opposed to, say, utter degradation and misery, it plays out more like a mash-up of Pretty Woman and EastEnders.