Nothing's shocking anymore. After hearing the words "semen-stained dress" during national news broadcasts, from the lips of super-square Dan Rather, no less, on a nightly basis during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, a grandma-cum-sex trade worker who orally stimulates anonymous men at a gentleman's club has less shock value than it might have, say, in the late-seventies, when Diane Keaton starred as a slutty schoolteacher, looking for love in all the wrong places, in Richard Brooks' "Looking for Mr. Goodbar". When Maggie(Marianne Faithful) jerks back and forth on a client's penis, just be grateful that filmmaker Catherine Breillat wasn't at the helm of "Irina Palm". It would just be too graphic for words. But the film is Breillat-like in the sense that the filmmaker de-eroticizes sex, by taking the sex organ out of context from the human body, which is something the French provocateur attempted with female genitalia in 1999's "Romance". The hand-job soon becomes a normal job, like an office job, which is the case for anybody involved in the sex industry, as exemplified when Maggie brings into her "office", some personal effects from home.<br /><br />Since the end-result of Maggie's unlikely occupation is for a good cause, the greater good blinds us to how unseemly her line of work really is. When Tom(Kevin Bishop) chastises Maggie after he discovers what mom has been up to, for the first time, do we question her sense of morality. "Irina Palm" stops being a deadpan comedy and asks its audience to take a second look at what Maggie is doing. Is she humiliating herself? Yes and no. At the beginning, yes, because Maggie was squeamish. But she did it anyway, as an act of love for her sick grandson. After the shock of the new wears off, Maggie starts to take pride in her job. She's good at it. The former-homemaker has never been good at anything in her life. Although Maggie lives in a good neighborhood, and has fancy friends, she's only upper-class by association. Her husband was rich. By being a sex industry worker, she's reclaiming her working class roots. Arguably, she doesn't belong in the parlour of a society friend, sipping tea with the ladies. Maggie finds herself, alone in a room with penises, and becomes something more substantial than a widow. Like the girls in Lizzie Borden's "Working Girls", Maggie finds feminism in the strangest places, too.