Working Girls is a fine feature film on an adult theme. It's a fictionalized documentary about a day in a New York brothel, but it doesn't patronize the girls or the viewer with the clichéd views of prostitution offered by Hollywood and television. Writer/ director Lizzie Bordon creates real people who have taken viable, though unconventional, options in life, and she offers us new ways to think about women who have always been seen as unfortunate, uneducated and masochistic two-dimensional characters with sad, violent lives.

The film creates dramatic tension through the viewers' involvement with the personalities of the women and their clients rather than by a manufactured plot, and does it with a mystery reminiscent of Truffautt's minor gems like Clair's Knee. The main character Molly (Louis Smith) is an attractive (but not glamorous) young woman with two college degrees who treats her job as a job, and meets with more success financially and with respect from clients and co-workers than she could get using her academic credentials in the "real" world. Lucy (Ellen McElduff) perfectly captures the essence of a real-life madam, one who's not a sleazy, gum-chewing old prostitute, but rather an attractive, successful business person with a good mind for organization and personnel management. Lucy is also shown as a woman who is trying to create alife for herself, although she has a jaundiced view of men.

The clients also have varied motives and styles, and the bedroom scenes give an incisive and real look at what goes on between girls and "Johns." The sex is pretty explicit for a mainstream film and will raise some eyebrows, but it's not done to turn on the audience. It just tells it like it is.