In contemporary Brussels, married social worker Kika (Manon Clavel) dedicates herself to helping others until an affair, followed by personal tragedy, shatters her life as she has known it. Finding herself alone and financially unstable, she must grapple with the fact that the same welfare system she once served offers her little in return now that she needs it. A chance conversation about making money by selling used underwear sets her on a path toward different forms of sex work. Alexe Poukine‘s first fiction feature after several well-regarded documentaries, “Kika” observes with an empathetic eye as its title character navigates this new terrain, sketching a warm and often humorous portrait of the human need to reclaim agency from despair.
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Kika is no victim, but a woman perpetually absorbing shocks, assessing those shocks, and recalibrating heroically. Clavel’s isn’t an especially showy performance, but one of impressive precision, suggesting entire emotional worlds through the smallest gestures — a glance withheld or a tremor in the voice. Even as the story ventures into more provocative territory, the actor’s quiet intelligence keeps the film grounded, ensuring that Kika’s choices play out less as “Belle de Jour”-style fantasies and more as practical, imaginative solutions to the hand that life has dealt her.
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Kika explores a particular collision of collapse and reinvention, observing how financial precarity and pressure can erode personal boundaries and generate unexpected forms of empowerment. Poukine is fascinated by survival as a slow act of self-rediscovery. The film’s ethical tension lies in its refusal to either condemn or romanticize Kika’s choices: Instead, it watches her negotiate some form of agency within the confines of an economy that commodifies her body and actions. In one tense yet darkly funny scene, she literally negotiates with an off-putting client who initially wants her to defecate on his face, before being talked into accepting a bag of excrement instead.
The debate between Kika and this unnamed man about the value of this particular product gets to the heart of much of the contemporary dialogue around certain forms of sex work. You’d be throwing it away for free anyway, runs his argument, so how much could it be worth? Of course, he is paying for the act of paying for it, for the handover, for the interaction and for myriad other compromises for which Kika will need to be compensated. These and other sequences, handled with anthropological curiosity rather than voyeurism, probe the shifting balance of power between giver and taker.
DP Colin Lévêque’s camera lingers not so much on the acts themselves but on their aftermath — moments where shame, relief, and bewilderment coexist, framing Kika’s world as both intimate and alienating. Editor Agnès Bruckert’s patient cutting allows the film’s fairly audacious tonal shifts (from tentative rom-com to psychological excavation) to unfold with poise, reinforcing the sense that catastrophe and self-redefinition can coexist within the same breath.
“Kika’s” subject matter, as rendered here, positions it firmly within the arthouse circuit. Following a festival run that kicked off in Critics’ Week at Cannes, marketing would hopefully seek to emphasize Clavel’s luminous performance and the film’s compassionate intelligence rather than simply hammering home the sex-work premise. For boutique distributors, Poukine’s film offers a quietly radical proposition: a story about economic survival told without too much sensationalism, appealing to viewers who appreciate moral ambiguity rendered with grace and emotional precision.