Belinda Lee played a large amount of real life people during her brief European career - Fausta, Messalina - and here she's a German prostitute who was murdered in real life. This inspired a German movie so successful it led to this new version around a year later which is odd, but money talks I guess and maybe they figured with Lee in the lead they'd have an edge.
She's not that good. I wish I could say otherwise because so rarely did she have the chance to be front and centre, as she is here (it is her story, not the tale of a man, but her). Lee has her moments - she is believable prostitute, the angles in her face give her a harshness, she seems to have been around, she's very sexy - but the heightened mascara makes her look vaguely drag queen-y, and too often she's required to glower and shout and seduce. We don't get much insight.
The best scenes are her murder and a moment where her masseuse starts talking about her life and blubs and hugs her in a quasi-queer way... that was unexpected. I admit I would've lost a lot of nuance because I saw this on auto translate. But the film seems to lack nuance and empathy.
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