TO avoid having their work consigned to the shelf marked X-rated (“Forbes” magazine estimates the value of the porn movie industry at more than $2 billion) filmmakers need to tread carefully with sexuality.

With “Elles”, Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska treads bravely but carefully through the minefield of sex work. Juliette Binoche plays well-off middle-class, married with two sons, magazine feature-writer Anne, doing a story about students supporting themselves by having sex with strangers for money.

Alicja (Joanna Kulig) and Charlotte aka Lola (Anais Demoustier) are intelligent and comfortable in their lifestyle choices. Writing their story becomes a sort of collegiate process, carried out against the background of Anne’s family life. Szumowska’s screenplay pulls no punches about either of those elements. A sequence in which Anne entertains her husband’s boss and another couple is awful for its absolute banality and treatment of traditional attitudes toward servient domesticity demeaning women.

Men don’t come off well in “Elles.” Wowsers may well decry its low-impact erotic moments even they don’t go as deeply into kink as they could have. It deals with love in the world of sex work by finding no place for it. Its only woman character to experience an orgasm is Anne herself, masturbating apparently to obliterate exasperation at the contrast between the sexual ambience of Alicja and Lola’s lives and her own.

Strong stuff, but worth seeing.

At Palace Electric