Mall girls interviewed here say that after choosing a benefactor, they follow him into a shop, and seduce him by trying on clothes. Sex is exchanged only for an agreed item like a blouse, never for cash. It usually takes place in the stalls of restrooms at the mall or in a car in the parking lot — a fact that has prompted intensified security at malls and forced mall girls to seek alternate locations, including nightclubs.

On a recent night at Space, a dance club that is a favorite of mall girls, dozens of teens in body-hugging black outfits gyrated to Polish hip-hop, accompanied by much older men, buying them $13 cocktails. “Life is expensive in Warsaw,” said Sylwia, a jobless 18-year-old who declined to give her last name, as she caressed the leg of a 31-year-old man she had just met.

Ms. Roslaniec called mall girls the daughters of capitalism. “Parents have lost themselves in the race after a new washing machine or car and are rarely home,” she said. “A 14-year-old girl needs a system of values that can’t be shaped without the guidance of parents. The result is that these girls live in a world where there are no feelings, just cold calculation.”

According to a recent study commissioned by the Ombudsman for Children in Poland, 20 percent of teenage prostitutes in Poland sell their bodies for designer clothes, fancy gadgets or concert tickets. Girls on average enter the sex trade at age 15; boys at 14.

Image Poland actress Anna Karczmarzyk from the Polish movie “Galerianki.” Credit... Adam Lach for The New York Times

Some critics complain that the film offers an idealized, glamorized version of the sex business. Monika Siuchta, a social worker, noted that real-life teenage prostitutes were often sexually abused, abandoned by their families and looked disheveled and neglected, despite their incongruous gold accessories.

Adam Bogoryja-Zakrzewski, who made a documentary about mall girls, said the phenomenon had laid bare the extent to which the powerful Polish Catholic church — anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-contraception — was out of touch with many members of the younger generation, for whom sex, alcohol and consumerism held more appeal. “The shopping mall has become the new cathedral in Poland,” he said.