The Good Woman of Bangkok

The Good Woman of Bangkok

The screen opens up to neon lit stages that has young nubile Thai women who gyrate and undulate to the beats of tawdry dance tunes. Right below them there are drunken lecherous foreigners who are waiting like hungry vultures to relinquish their cheap conquests for the murky evening.  It was yet another dark night of devian gratification at the local hell hole, well captured in Dennis O’Rourke’s “The Good Woman of Bangkok” which is considered to be one of the most memorable and powerful documentaries that have been represented on screen about prostitution.

The starting credits tells us that Dennis O’Rourke travelled to Thailand post divorce in an attempt to understand how love could be both so banal yet so profound. He decided to find his answers in the shady neon lit red light districts of Thailand. He meets Yaiwalak Chonchanakun, a Thai prostitute who is nicknames Aoi which translates into sugarcane. What mesmerizes the viewer is the unbearable poignant cast of Aoi’s eyes. She is blind in her left eye and it is a picture of an unseeing limpid black object well detached from the rest of her. It is a portrayal of her same detached attitude as she saunters amidst the gaudy tourist flooded noisy neon studded streets of Bangkok. There seems to be a different part of her world that remains untouched and perhaps sentimentally undermined.  This inner realm is portrayed in the documentary with the help of a soul wrenching Mozart aria sung by Dame Janet baker and the wounding melody seems to soar well above the heavy air that hangs over the streets Aoi takes to shuttle to her hotel dates.  

The Good Woman of Bangkok is all about Aoi’s unseeing blind eye and the far more hideous world that lies in front of her seeing eyes.  The entire documentary tries to expose the pain in Aoi’s life and O’Rourke’s ignominy for being a part of it.  It provides the viewers with a unmediated veracity of the reality.  O’Rourke is never on camera himself but he is a constant gaze, a presence, of deep penetrating love that he feels for Aoi. She talks to this ‘gaze’ testily, sometimes desultorily. Occasionally she threatens it, other times she pleads with it to retreat as she tries to shield herself for the penetrating gaze. While filming her, O’Rourke wills himself to fall in love with his subject just to become a equivalent victims of her way of life. This is portrayed in the film’s moral parameter that says that it is better to be victimized than to be exploited (Berry and Hamilton et al., 1997).  

The use of Bangkok is symbolic, since it is the ultimate ‘sin city’ for the jaded westerners. It is the capital of economic and sexual exploitation. Similarly the choice of Aoi is also symbolic as she is the ultimate victim. Amidst a life of pain, poverty, betrayal and exploitation, even as Aoi bitterly denounces every man off the face of earth, the male dominated gaze through the camera stays with her unflinchingly. There lies a completely different world in between O’Rourke’s omnipresent camera and Aoi’s blind eye which in its own eerily cruel way mirrors our own views (Rieker, 1993).

The storyline of the movie can be judged as smug while border lining on the frustration Aoi has about her suppressed but subsequent anger and her unsympathetic existence.  The documentary is a good case in point of the construct of meta text that concerns the imperialist junction of film making and the sex industry (Berry and Hamilton et al., 1997). It talks about the gender power and economic constructs when it comes to the structure of prostitution.  There are repeated shots taken of the dingy smoky dark bars and the neon lit stages where the women expose themselves to the raw lust of unforgiving lecherous drunks by inserting various different objects in their vagina, while there are other shots of the women complaining to each other about their ‘acts’ in the dressing rooms backstage.