Director – Junna Chif – 2025 – Canada – 94m
****1/2
A sex worker turned exotic dancer starts providing sexual services to disabled people – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
“Blow jobs are real jobs – and real jobs suck” reads a slogan held by three boisterous young women on a protest march. In a nightclub, we watch one of them perform a burlesque striptease to rapturous applause from the audience, seated in male and female blocks. ‘Ella’ (Nadia Essadiqi from Incendies, Denis Villeneueve, 2010) later gets an email from the disabled brother of a friend stating he is now “ready for full sexual intercourse”.
She decides to meet the challenge, so the sender turns up in a van with his carer Marco (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) who hoists him onto the bed, then departs for an hour leaving a contact number. Floyd (Floyd Lapierre-Poupart) can’t move much and has club hands and feet, and their initial encounter proves less than successful, resulting in his premature ejaculation. You sense that the whole exercise is way outside both their comfort zones. In the tense exchange that follows with Marco, he emphasises that the correct term is “people with a disability, Miss” and she retorts with, “sex workers, Sir.”
Afterwards, she googles his condition Arthrogroposis, gets her hair made over, and goes back to visit him in his sheltered accommodation unannounced, which as a friend tells her is not the way to do it. Nevertheless, she tracks him down, tells him she’d like to talk and that the aim this time round should be “to have a good time”.
Threatening to reveal his purchase of her services for Floyd to his employers – under Canadian law, it’s legal to sell sexual services but not to buy them – she gets Marco to take her along to a couple of his clients Romero and Marianne as a carer to see first-hand how he deals with them. Armed with her new skills, she has a far more satisfactory session with Floyd.
Ella sets up a website advertising her sexual services for the disabled. This leads her to François (Stéphane Crête) who she finds sitting in his wheelchair by a river and helps him float in the water. She is taken more than a little aback when she meets Frédérick (Patrick Desjardins) whose carer Maria (Tatiana Zinga Botao) turns out to be his wife who is signed up for an open relationship. Like Floyd, François turns out to be a regular, but on one session she fails to insist he pay her ‘donation’ and next time he has got the wrong idea, i.e. that she likes him rather than that she is simply providing a service. It’s a job and there are boundaries, and he has overstepped them.
For the finale, she persuades Frenchie (Pascale Jones aka Frenchy Jones), who runs the club at which she performs and MCs the show, to let her put on a night for the disabled audience, which proves a great success. This actually proves odd, as if the film has suddenly run out of ideas. It starts off brilliantly with the device of Floyd’s email setting everything up in the first place. It then proves fascinating as it navigates the taboo worlds of disability and disabled people having sex. However it also becomes episodic, a series of episodes about a series of clients, and doesn’t seem to know either how to develop that or, indeed, what its overall goal might be.
On this level, you might compare it with the similarly episodic, but thematically very different, Critics’ Picks entry A Summer Tale (Matías Szulanski, 2025), which is about a man defeated by circumstances, specifically his failing health which can’t keep up with the unrealistic demands of his job and lifestyle. There’s no similar feeling in Invisibles of moving inevitably towards a particular state – the piece just runs out of steam, with nowhere to go. Still, it is to be congratulated for taking on taboo issues and making a genuine attempt to grapple with them. And for portraying real disabled people attempting to have sex, with all the challenges that involves.
Invisibles premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: