Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but Hollywood has traditionally treated its purveyors in resolutely stereotypical terms, as grin-and-bare-it whores with hearts of gold, as dispensable victims set up as the prey of psycho killers, or as misplaced women who enjoy fairytale endings - as in Pretty Woman.
There have been a few exceptions, and one is the gritty, low-budget US indie, Claire Dolan, which finally is getting a release two years after it was launched at Cannes. The film features Katrin Cartlidge in the title role, as a thirtysomething from Howth, Co Dublin, an emotionally brittle woman who works as a prostitute in New York to pay off a substantial unspecified debt, which involves harsh interest payments to her unscrupulous pimp, Roland Cain.
Cain is played with chilling, menacedripping presence - and in a remarkable stretch of range - by the Irish actor, Colm Meaney. An utterly callous operator, Cain claims to have known Claire since she was 12, and he tells her she was born, and will die, a whore. "The film makes it clear that he has known her for a long time," says Katrin Cartlidge, "and he has probably used his position as a so-called family friend to manipulate her."
Claire Dolan is depicted as a sophisticated, businesslike woman, regularly changing home and identity to keep her clients at an emotional distance from herself, and the only man to whom she responds emotionally in the film is a gregarious taxi driver (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) who has difficulty in accepting the fact of her prostitution.
That dilemma is addressed unflinchingly in this cool, hard-edged and sombre moral tale directed with distinction and an austere visual style by Lodge Kerrigan, a 36-year-old New Yorker whose only previous feature film was the intense, fragmented 1993 drama Clean, Shaven with Peter Greene as a schizophrenic on a tormented search for his daughter, who is being kept from him.
"I saw Clean, Shaven and I was just blown away by it," says Katrin Cartlidge. "Apparently Lodge made it over various weekends and he even lost the main actor about two-thirds of the way through it, but he pulled it together with such skill. He's a new voice in the cinema - and of my generation, of which there are not many. "When he sent me the script for Claire Dolan I was so taken with it that I stayed up until two in the morning reading it. It was such a precise script, with nothing extraneous about it, not a blink. And that's such a refreshing thing to find at a time when so many films are generalised and over-relaxed. It was so simple and so complex, and with an understanding of female psychology that is very rare in films."
Kerrigan and Cartlidge agreed not to over-emphasise the Irishness of the Claire Dolan character. "Lodge wanted very much to focus on a person in America who was not American," she says. "Of course, with a name like Kerrigan he probably has some Irish connections himself. We toyed with the idea of giving her a stronger Irish accent, but it was more important to suggest that she had been in America for some time. She's also a woman desperate for anonymity and getting rid of identity and assuming so many other identities."
Cartlidge herself has built her career playing mostly edgy and troubled women, probably because she made such an impact with her deeply immersed portrayal of a volatile, spaced-out character in Mike Leigh's Naked, seven years ago. Apart from working with Leigh again on Career Girls and playing "a smallish role" in the Chris Menges movie, The Lost Son, Cartlidge, who lives in London, has worked mostly outside her native England and for non-English directors - Milcho Machevski (Before the Rain), Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves), Constantin Giannaris (Three Steps to Heaven), Michael Cacoyannis (The Cherry Orchard), before Lodge Kerrigan on Claire Dolan, her first American film.
"I just work with the people I have some affinity with and who want to work with me," she says. "I don't really care where that is. But no, as you say, it hasn't happened a lot in England apart from the two films with Mike Leigh. The English have a different sensibility, and it's not one I quite understand sometimes."
As for playing so many damaged, emotionally traumatised characters, she responds: "I'm probably alone in this view, but I'm not sure I've ever met a human being who wasn't damaged to some extent. That's not to say that I think the whole world is this dark old place inhabited only by lunatics. But I think if you scratch the surface of most people. . .
"Films tend to be about people in extreme circumstances. If it was all about somebody having a cup of tea at four o'clock in the afternoon, it would all be a little bit boring. So film-makers tend to choose to depict people at a certain point of drama and tension in their life, so it's kind of unavoidable to play people who are involved in some form of crisis. I think it would be extremely boring to play someone who was really well-balanced.
"The whole point of examining the human psyche is to look at the problems as much as the strengths. There's a Carly Simon song which I think is really crummy, but it has this line, `there's more room in a broken heart', and I've always liked that line. There can be more strength in a broken person, too, I think. When you look at something that's broken you can actually see how it's made and what's inside it, and it gives you some clue how you can mend it."
So is Katrin Cartlidge herself damaged? "Of course," she says with a smile. And is that why she works as an actor? "I think people want to be creative because they have a desire to express what they see as much as what they are," she says. "Obviously, what they are informs what they see, while at the same time it's not a desire to have some form of public therapy. I think it's actually a desire to describe something. It's a form of communication."
Like Bree Daniels, the character played by Jane Fonda in Klute, Claire Dolan is essentially an actress as she deals with the men who hire her services. I ask Katrin Cartlidge how she dealt with portraying somebody else whose work is a series of performances.
"That was riveting," she responds. "I have to say that one of the most interesting things about playing this role was the parallel between what she does as a character in the film and what I was doing as an actor. I had to draw on my own experience as an actor sometimes to understand her as a prostitute. One of the first questions I asked myself was: to what extent does she involve herself emotionally with her clients?
"A question I get asked a lot, for example, is to what extent do I really fall in love with the people I'm supposed to fall in love with in the films I make? Well, the answer is that I fall in love with all of them and none of them. It's not easy to say I absolutely don't fall in love with them. Of course, I do - on the level of working with them, on the level of the character, on the level of sharing in a creative experience.
"So, in that respect, things are not black and white, but of course I can't possibly be falling in love with every person I do a love scene with, because I'd go insane. I also have a life with somebody I really am in love with and that's quite separate.
"It was really interesting to play Claire Dolan and to examine some of those questions. I also had to be involved with eight different men in the film, and I had to make all those actors feel at ease. I got to the point as an actor where I would say to them, `Hello, how do you do? You can touch me here, but not there'. Then, `Action, cut, great scene, lovely, take care, goodbye'."
Claire Dolan runs at the IFC in Dublin from May 5th to 25th and it opens at the Triskel Cinematek in Cork on May 31st