The Unhappy Hooker: Vernier Explores Ennui in Monaco
Interconnected drifters aligned with sex work once again provide the backbone for Virgil Vernier’s third feature 100,000,000,000,000 (aka Cent mille milliards), a reference to the futile amount of money required to buy freedom…or happiness. A handsome young escort in Monaco has a life-changing connection during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the desolate period for the transients and wanderers who find themselves isolated. An interesting idea inadequately executed transforms a seventy-minute running time into a tormenting exercise of patience, a meandering and desultory effort which feels as unmoored from reflecting human experiences as its characters do from their purported apathy.
Afine (Zakaria Bouti) is an eighteen-year-old escort who leads a comfortable life living alongside three other sex-workers with dreams of something greater. When his three femme counterparts head to Dubai to celebrate Christmas, Afine is invited to spend the holiday with an old friend, a Serbian woman named Vespa (Mina Gajovic), who is babysitting a twelve-year-old girl named Julia (Victoire Song). It seems Julia’s wealthy parents have been called away for the holidays, embroiled in overseeing an expensive project not only expanding Monaco’s land mass but also constructing their own man-made island nearby. Vesna seems to have ulterior motives for inviting Afine along with them, but she settles for commiseration, relaying her own future plans to open a shop as a stone healer in Nice. Afine, however, seems to bond with Julia, and they stay up talking late one night, the young girl revealing to him knowledge of a universe beyond the one he knows, changing the trajectory of his life.
As Afine, Zakaria Bouti is an interesting screen presence, but there’s no real interiority constructed for his character. Adrift with a ragtag group of sex workers in Monaco, they’ve carved out what seems like a hardwon survival with plans for building an empire together as high-end escorts. As seen with the clients we meet hiring Afine, a married Black man and an older white woman, he seems emotionally removed but sexually fluid. In one of the film’s opening exchanges, his colleagues compare interactions of note from their past exchanges, mostly conveying the memorable strangeness of their experiences. All the information we receive about Afine is really regarding his lack of motivation more than anything else. So the peculiar threesome between himself, Vesna, and the child Julia seems to transpire incidentally, and coalesces into a moment in which he purportedly has an epiphany.
An hour into the film, Julia’s narration conveys a conversation about a world beyond their own, in essence, in which the two of them stayed up all night talking. Later, it’s revealed this conversation left Afine spiritually transformed, and no longer interested in continuing a career as an escort. The film’s terminology suggests something along the lines of psychic astral projection, as earlier, Julia asked Afine if he remembers the time they were kittens on a rooftop in the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, these exploratory existential elements only feel nonsensical, as does Vesna’s demeaning confrontation with Afine on New Year’s Eve where she expresses guilt over ‘housing a whore.’
The film’s earlier segments featuring Afine’s narration over a brooding score while we drift through the empty, neon-lit streets of Monaco, which has all the superficial glitz of seeming like the Las Vegas of the French Riviera, recalls any number of agonized 1980s characters drifting through some desolate American metropolis, like New York or Los Angeles. But these fleeting moments reaching for something resembling authenticity dissipate quickly. Whatever dazzling experience transpired between the sad sex worker and the wealthy, precocious twelve-year-old is never conveyed or configured effectively, the reality of their lives handled with kid gloves, ultimately exaggerating it’s own self-importance as drastically as the nonsensical numeral after which it’s titled.
Reviewed on August 14th at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival (77th edition) — Concorso Internazionale section. 77 Mins.
★½/☆☆☆☆☆
