A FILM about a woman who pays for sex has thrown the spotlight on a taboo subject in France, where the age-old profession of the gigolo is flourishing on demand from a growing population of affluent, middle-aged divorcees.

Cliente, the film, features Nathalie Baye, one of France’s foremost actresses, in the role of Judith, a 51-year-old television shopping channel presenter who, after the collapse of her marriage, enjoys paying for sex with much younger men.

Josiane Balasko, the director and writer, said she wanted to highlight the plight of women who separate from their husbands in their forties and find it difficult to move on, a common situation in a land of rising divorce.

“They cannot always remake their lives and have more children, like men,” she says. “All that remains for them is to shut up shop or start another type of relationship.”

In the film, Judith turns to gigolos to escape a loveless life revolving around work and backgammon evenings at home with her sister, played by Balasko.

From an internet website she meets an escort who charges £240 for sex in the back of his car. They begin to meet regularly and she becomes increasingly attached to the man, Marco, who is married to a hairdresser and sells himself to pay the mortgage and support an extended family.

Balasko said she wanted to make an alternative to Pretty Woman, the Hollywood film in which a wealthy businessman, played by Richard Gere, falls for Julia Roberts in the role of a hooker. “Prostitution is usually a very masculine thing,” she said.

“So it interested me to show a female client of a male escort. This is a woman who controls her life, her feelings, her pleasure, when the pleasure of going to see a prostitute is usually reserved for men. It is a final male bastion.”

In recent years the subject has become a cultural obsession in France, which is taking a well documented taste for eroticism to new extremes with a series of films and books exploring the gigolo’s world.

One was a novel about a French diplomat who is dismissed because of his double life as a lunch-hour gigolo; another film featured Charlotte Rampling in the role of a middle-aged woman who pays for love in the arms of a Haitian youth.

The trend has been fuelled by internet advertising by gigolos. So rich are the pickings that French practitioners, whose traditional hunting ground is the Riviera, a haven for wealthy widows and divorcees, are facing competition, judging by the announcement of a Paris-based escort who calls himself “Earl Grey” and offers his services for £150 an hour on an internet website.

“I am a high-class English professional working in the investment industry for a top-performing fund,” he proclaims. “I love to meet new people and to have fun, not because I need to.” He describes himself as “an experienced companion for an evening out, bilingual, public school and university educated”.

“Cary”, an Italian gigolo who says that he likes working in Monaco and Paris, calls himself “the ultra-rare, true, independent, straight, Italian professional male escort who caters to the affluent, high society, super rich”.

He boasts of offering a “first class service, in or out of the bedroom” and adds that “my goal is to pleasure clients in every way that I can”.

A former professional body-builder, his rate is £5,000 for a two-hour session, not including first-class airline tickets and five-star hotels.

In Balasko’s film, the gigolo is a more modest figure who meets clients between jobs on building sites. It leads to heartbreak when his wife finds out.

Balasko said that at first she had difficulty finding backers for her film because it dealt with such a taboo. However, when she turned her script into a novel, it became a bestseller.

Baye said that she had no qualms about playing Judith. Asked by one interviewer if she had ever paid a man to have sex with her in real life, she replied: “It’s an idea, I will maybe think about it from now on.”

She told Paris Match magazine: “Trying the experience, why not? But being well known has its drawbacks. It would be disastrous if in the escort milieu they talked about how one of them ended up sleeping with Nathalie Baye.”

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