Hardcore

Hardcore pissed me the fuck off. I expected this going in. The film is about underage sex workers. This is a difficult subject to tackle and I am especially concerned when it’s tackled by male filmmakers. There’s a tendency to get exploitative and salacious in its depiction of trafficked girls. And that’s certainly the case here. What pissed me off even further though is that beyond my moral issues with the film, it’s frustratingly well directed.

Hardcore focuses on two female prostitutes, Nadia and Martha. At the beginning of the film, they are 16 and 17 respectively. Nadia starts a relationship with Martha as Nadia claims Martha needs someone to take care of her. The girls continue as allies and move in together. After a time, Nadia desires more from life and kills their pimp as well as a few others in a home invasion. She then pins this crime on a male prostitute friend and occasional lover of hers. Nadia is cleared of all charges but the case gets media attention. She leverages this attention into a career as a model and television presenter. Martha tags along for the ride, unsure about whether she still loves Nadia as Nadia grows increasingly cold and distant as their circumstances improve.

Hardcore has infuriatingly little sympathy for its underage sex workers. Nadia does a lot of crime and manipulation but this is never connected back to the trauma she faced as a teen prostitute. Nah, she’s just a bad person. It offers its teen sex workers a surprising amount of agency. This should be a good thing but it’s both unrealistic given the setting and a chance to place the blame onto the girls. Both girls, for example seem to have half-decent home lives. Nadia in particular engages in sex work so she can buy music and because she likes sex. What a groundbreaking and sympathetic depiction of victims of underage trafficking.

When Nadia kills several people, she asks Martha to lie for her. Martha, being the passive character she is, does so. The lies consist of Nadia and Martha framing themselves as traumatized victims. It’s pretty fucking gross that a movie about underage sex workers depicts them talking about their trauma as a “lie.” In this resepct, the subtext I read from Hardcore is that women who accuse men of sex crimes or abuse are attention seeking liars. There’s a lot of victim blaming and blame shifting from pimps and those who solicit underage girls onto the girls themselves.

In general, the whole underage prostitution thing feels quite shallow. Like I mentioned, there was ample opportunity to tie these girl’s actions or feelings about life back to this circumstance. The movie generally refuses to do so. Both girls seem largely unaffected by their work. Their personalities are set at the start and the choices they make don’t often seem impacted by their position. Really, the sex work angle is just edgy window dressing for the story. It’s an excuse to show a bunch of nudity in nasty, “gritty” locations. Hardcore is edgy for the sake of edge. It has no interest in delving deep into the lives of prostitutes in Greece, it just likes that gritty aesthetic that comes with that concept.

But while I have so many issues with the story and characters, I’m furious at how well this movie is directed. With its focus on such a gritty topic, I expected a low budget look with a lot of handheld camera work and little focus given to setting up shots. That’s not the case. Hardcore has a lot of intent in how it shoots any scene. The camera work is good. There’s style and deliberate aesthetic. It looks like it has both budget and talent behind it. Really, what it feels like is an underground rock music video from the 2000’s. You take any 3 minutes of Hardcore and put some music behind it and you’ve got what would be a decent music video. It reminds me of The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up. Except Hardcore is 96 minutes yet still the same level of depth and sympathy remain.

Hardcore is definitely a movie where my issues are moral rather than necessarily artistic. Though I do think the character work was poor. But as well directed and intentional as this movie’s edgy, gritty aesthetic was, I cannot stomach or condone it. Hardcore offers wildly little sympathy, understanding or depth to its teenage sex workers. It engages in victim blaming and overall minimizes how reprehensible underage sex work is. I find this shallow and exploitative depiction to be fucking reprehensible and no amount of well framed shots can undo that.

Overall rating: 3.3/10

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