Any film title starting with the words "Confessions of a..." conjures up memories of that (generally pretty feeble) series of British softcore sex comedies from the 1970s, but "Confessions of a Go-Go Girl", a more recent (2008) American-Canadian film, is not a horse from that particular stable. It is ostensibly set in Chicago but was mostly filmed in Canada, although a few genuine Chicago locations appear for the sake of authenticity.
The main character is Jane McCoy, a girl from a well-heeled upper middle-class family, who decides to become an actress, much to the disgust of her parents who do not consider acting a proper career and would much rather she became a lawyer. They refuse to fund her studies at drama school, leaving her in financial difficulties, so when her friend Angela suggests an "easy way" to make extra money Jane is all too ready to listen.
The job Angela has in mind is, of course, go-go dancing at a local club. This development might suggest that the film will go down one of two routes, becoming either (Route 1) a sex comedy along the lines of the late and unlamented British "Confessions" series ("Jane and Angela get up to all sorts of randy antics with their male customers") or (Route 2) a lurid exposé of the dark side of the adult entertainment industry ("Jane and Angela slide further and further down the slippery slope of moral depravity and come to a bad end").
Well, this film is certainly not a comedy. As far as Angela is concerned it follows Route 2 without deviating from the roadmap. The club where she and Jane start out is quite tame by the standards of the adult industry; the girls dance in their underwear, but nudity and toplessness are forbidden, as is touching the punters or allowing them to touch you. Angela realises that more money can be made by dancing in those clubs which offer raunchier forms of entertainment and, predictably, goes tumbling down the aforesaid slippery slope into drug addiction and prostitution before coming to the inevitable bad end. She dies on the operating table during a breast-enhancement operation following an adverse reaction between the anaesthetic and all those drugs in her system, making the film a very twenty-first century morality tale against the sin of vanity. Or at least the vanity of wanting big breasts.
And Jane? Well Jane may be a go-go dancer but she is still at heart a sweet young thing; indeed, part of her appeal for a certain type of punter is her ability to combine sexiness with cuteness. (It helps that Chelsea Hobbs, the actress who plays her, is more girl-next-door than Hollywood glamour queen). Of course, all does not go well even with Jane. She believes that her work is beneficial to her acting career because it enables her to explore facets of her personality which would otherwise remain hidden, but this sort of logic cuts no ice with her drama teacher, a devotee of High Culture who cannot tolerate her students having any involvement with Low Culture. (And in her eyes go-go dancing is right down at the bargain basement end of the market).
Jane also further alienates her parents when her brother, quite ignorant of his sister's way of earning her pin money, happens to choose her club for his stag do and walks through the door with his friends while she is on stage. To make matters worse, her father is with them. Ignoring Jane's argument that her working in such an establishment is morally no worse than his patronising it, the stern paterfamilias goes into "Never darken my doors again!" mode. Nevertheless, Jane has enough strength of character not to follow Angela down the primrose path to destruction and, for her, all ends happily.
"Confessions of a Go-Go Girl", actually, is not a bad film, certainly not as bad as I feared it might be. It might be full of clichés, especially in its treatment of Angela's story, but Hobbs makes Jane a likeable heroine and there is enough material here to provide an entertaining hour-and-a-half. 6/10
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