Katarzyna Roslaniec, a former film student, first spotted a cluster of mall girls six years ago, decked out in thigh-high latex boots. They followed them and chatted them up over cigarettes. Over the next six months, the teens told her about their sex lives, about the men they called “sponsors,” about their lust for expensive labels, their absent parents, their premature pregnancies, their broken dreams.
WARSAW — They hang about at the mall for hours, young teenage girls selling their bodies in return for designer jeans, Nokia cell phones, even a pair of socks.
They gossiped with them on Grono.net, the Polish equivalent of Facebook. Soon, they had a giant network of mall girls.
Ms. Roslaniec, 29, scribbled their secrets in her notepad, memorizing the way they peppered their speech with words like “frajer” — “loser” in English.
The result is the darkly devastating fictional film, “Galerianki,” or Mall Girls, which premiered in Poland in the autumn and has provoked an ongoing national debate about moral decadence in this conservative, predominantly Catholic country, 20 years after the fall of Communism.
The film tells the story of six teenage girls who turn tricks in the restrooms of shopping malls to support their clothing addiction. It's attained such cult status that parents across the country say they are confiscating DVDs of the film for fear it provides a lurid instruction manual.
The revelation that Catholic girls, some from middle-class families, are prostituting themselves for a Chanel scarf or an expensive sushi dinner is causing plenty of here to query whether materialism is polluting the nation’s soul.
In the film, the character Milena, the knowing and vampish queen of the mall girls, explains to Ala, her innocent protégé, how to target an affluent sponsor: “Look at a guy’s shoes, his watch, and his phone and you can tell if it’s expensive. It’s a start, right?” they explains. Love doesn’t exist, they adds, what matters is what you can get for sex.
On a recent night at Space, a former train station-turned-dance club that is a favorite of mall girls, dozens of teens in body-hugging black outfits gyrated to Polish hip-hop, flanked by much older men, buying them €10, or $13, cocktails. “Life is expensive in Warsaw,” said Sylwia, a jobless 18-year-old, as they caressed the leg of a 31-year-old man they had met. “I need to find somebody to help pay the rent.”
The real-life mall girls say that after choosing a benefactor, they follow him in to a shop, and seduce him by trying on clothes. Sex is exchanged only for an agreed item like a blouse, never for funds. It usually takes place in the stalls of bathrooms at the mall or in a automobile in the parking lot — a fact that has prompted intensified security at malls and forced the mall girls to seek out alternate venues.
Ms. Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. “Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or automobile and are never home. A 14-year-old girl needs a method of values that can’t be shaped without the guidance of parents. The result is that these girls live in a world where there's no feelings, chilled calculation.”
Some cultural critics here agree that mall girls are a symptom of a post-Communist society, while others contend that the filmmaker has exaggerated the phenomenon. But Ms. Roslaniec noted that the trend was not limited to Poland. At screenings of the film, from Hong Kong to Tel Aviv to Toronto, they said, they was amazed by the number of teens who came up to her and told her about mall girls at their own schools.
According to a recent study commissioned by the Ombudsman for Babies in Poland, 20 percent of teenage prostitutes in Poland sell their bodies in order to earn money for designer clothes, fancy gadgets or concert tickets. Girls on average enter the sex trade at age 15; boys at 14.
“The only country where teens seemed genuinely surprised by the film was in Finland,” they noted — a wealthy welfare state.
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