FLOURISH OF STRUMPETS IN ‘SERVICES’

Movie comedies about prostitution risk being either vulgar or emptily moralistic, depending on how much guilt film makers and audiences bring to the subject. “Personal Services” (Laemmle’s Royal and Odeon Fairfax) establishes a different mood of eye-rolling jocularity and blithe lunacy.

The story is based on reality: the career of British madame Cynthia Payne, played here by Julie Walters of “Educating Rita.” The film makers have taken as many liberties with Mme. Payne as her clients did, renaming her Christine Paynter and apparently tossing out most of her career. Throughout, their tone seems a little unhinged and dotty--prostitution as Ronald Searle might have drawn it, with hookers as daffy as the Belles of St. Trinian’s.

Director Terry Jones and writer David Leland adopt a mixed tone. On the surface, everything seems unbuttoned. Jones handles the gaga romps and gags with the brisk expertise, mocking intelligence and spiky high spirits you’d expect of a Monty Pythonite. But, underneath, there’s an oppressive quality, like being sealed in a closet under a rainy roof. You’re grateful for the jokes, music and bright lights, but often they seem a diversion. You’d like more air to seep inside.

Closets are one of the movie’s motifs; this brothel services an ungodly number of transvestites. Is cross-dressing a universal vice of the British professional classes? Or is Jones simply dragging back all his Python drag acts? He and Leland are forever trapping us in murky hallways--places of secret vice, dark desires, tatty furnishings, where the wood always seems sodden, the air musty. In these hallways, away from the dense hurly-burly outside, we watch mild-mannered British professional men--barristers, clerks and landlords--prancing around in knickers and lingerie, donning black bikinis and begging to be whipped.

These tweedy Johns lock themselves in boxes, bind themselves with rubber masks and gags, bat sad eyes yearningly at black leather dominatrixes, carouse in bridal gowns and bite stiff upper lips while pretending to be lesbian schoolgirls. There’s a desperate coyness here, an epidemic naughtiness; “Naughty Boys” might in fact have been a slightly more accurate title.

The best scenes usually revolve around these equivocal customers: Leon Lissek’s lamb-eyed Mr. Popozogolou--or Benjamin Whitrow’s frightfully polite Mr. Marsden. With more flamboyant parts, like Alec McCowen’s Wing Commander Morton, the center seems off--Morton goes past overkill with his braying confessions of all the RAF missions he proudly flew in bra and panties.

Julie Walters is an excellent actress who brings vibrant, thorny toughness to her role. But the other prostitutes lack the satiric fleshiness of the men. They tend toward fantasy, with two exceptions: skinny, lazy, bored Rose (Victoria Hardcastle), who leaves before the bordello gets going, and maid Dolly (Danny Schiller), who turns out to have an unusual secret.

In “Working Girls,” made by women, the hookers are presented as victims and their customers as brutes. In “Personal Services,” made by men, the working girls are tough mommies telling kinky bedtime stories and their customers are naughty children who need--and screamingly want--to be spanked. The truth, even the satiric truth, probably lies somewhere in between. In this movie’s vaguely sedentary world, with Christine’s tea boiling in the kitchen, the pros themselves seem an anachronism. There’s a desperate liveliness to their routines--while the clients seem universally soft and squidgy, primed to dissolve under the acid of the movie’s wit.

There’s a strong element of social satire in “Personal Services” (MPAA rated R for sex, language and nudity), and many of its jokes sting and hit mercilessly. But there’s a certain creeping sentimentality, too. Leland co-wrote “Mona Lisa” with Neil Jordan, and there, sentimentalization was counterbalanced by madness, danger, romance--most of all, by visual poetry. Here, as a balance, there’s ebullient levity and iconoclastic gags. They’re a cheering gift in a dingy, deceptive world, but they’re not always enough.