This article was written as part of the Lab of Creative, Cultural and Festival Journalism held within the European Film Festival Palić and organised by the MIOB festival network. This network includes Crossing Europe Filmfestival Linz (AT), the Seville Film Festival (ES), European Film Festival Palić (RS), Les Arcs European Film Festival (FR), Scanorama European Film Forum (LT), Trieste Film Festival (IT) and FilmFestival Cottbus (DE). With the support of the Creative Europe - MEDIA programme, this project provides cinema journalism training for students and recent graduates. The next edition of the Lab will take place at FilmFestival Cottbus.

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A middle-aged divorcée in high heels and a skimpy "bodycon" dress wearing a perpetually strained smile on her face makes the rounds at a convention stand. A teenage girl stuck in the suburbs with her ailing mother decides to sell her body to strange men on the internet to finance her way out of her hometown.

These are the two generations of women whose lives become intertwined in mononymous Luxembourgish director Koxi’s feature debut, Women as Lovers – an adaptation of Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek’s 1975 novel – which premiered in the Forum section of the 76th Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and has now screened at the European Film Festival Palić.

The main narrative follows Brigitte (Johanna Wokalek) – the aforementioned divorcée – who works as a hostess at a convention centre selling luxury bunkers to wealthy men, who often make unwanted advances. Unable to get out of the financial rut her divorce has left her in, Brigitte spends her nights scrolling through the social media accounts of Paula (Hannah Schiller), a neighbouring girl from her hometown whom she used to babysit.

The film intersperses Brigitte’s ascent from glorified arm candy for rich men to their equal with images from Paula’s iPhone footage. Stifled by her mother’s overbearing love, and desperate to get out of the Kackdorf (lit. "shitty village") in which she was born, Paula documents her foray into the world of online sex work: recording herself delivering a pair of used socks by hand or bottling up her bathwater in jars to sell.

Both Brigitte and Paula perform their gender for a male audience in exchange for financial gain. Women as Lovers frames heterosexual relationships as purely transactional, wherein both men and women are expected to fulfil their designated roles – however unwillingly – in order to benefit from the social contract of a heteronormative partnership.

After being kicked out of the gym in which she has been sleeping, Brigitte becomes involved with the wealthy yet insecure Heinz (Ben Münchow), who lives alone with his mother in a colossal mansion. Heinz struggles to keep his end of the bargain – he's a perennially whiny manchild who injects himself with testosterone to live up to his warped image of masculinity.

By the time Brigitte uses Heinz’s chronic lack of self-confidence to manipulate her way into his family inheritance, the begrudging cynicism of Koxi’s adaptation has fully bubbled to the surface. Women as Lovers nimbly finds a way out of the heteropatriarchy that reduces bodies to their exchange value within the sexual marketplace through acerbic acquiescence.