_The Good Woman of Bangkok_ reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs Watching Dennis O'Rourke's _The Good Woman of Bangkok_ is a disturbing experiencce. Both frustrated and smug, the film appears to be about a Thai prostitute named Aoi, specifically her harsh existence and subsequent anger. On top of this, the movie constructs a clever meta-text concerning the imperialistic intersections of the sex industry and filmmaking. While such an idea is hardly news, _Woman_ offers it up as a weighty cultural insight, a painful exposure of the way it "really is.'' The route to such insight is (of course) circuitous. The final credits reveal that this is a "documentary fiction,'' announcing O'Rourke's disdain for the more traditional mode of what he terms elsewhere, "truth in a box.'' Here the use of documentary conventions, like talking heads and handheld camera excursions through Thai bars at night, is framed by an elaborately styled empathy for Aoi, apparently cool and ambiguous, but most often emerging as a kind of lumpy moralizing. An early title in the film informs us that O'Rourke (in the third person) went to Thailand following his divorce at age 43, "trying to understand how love could be so banal and also so profound.'' In other words, he went there to check out Bangkok's notorious traffic in women. Once there, he met Aoi, made her the subject of his movie in exchange for a rice farm, left after nine months, and has recently been on the interview circuit claiming that he "willed'' himself to fall in love with her so that they would be equivalent "victims.'' (He says, in at least one conversation, that at the time he eschewed condoms in order to "share'' her risk of AIDS.) O'Rourke's seriously self-serving logic suggests his film's moral parameters: to be a victim is "good'' and to exploit is "bad.'' _Woman_ straddles this flimsy ethical fence by extending a cursory analysis of the economic and gendered power structures of prostitution. This includes repeated shots of dark and smoky bars, stages where naked women put various objects in their vaginas for cheering and hard-drinking customers, even backstage dressing rooms where the women complain to one another. Such conventional raucus night-life images are intercut with still camera shots of the soft-spoken Aoi, showing her private self, different from her otherwise highly performative existence. In the apartment she shared with O'Rourke for the duration of the shoot, Aoi speaks to her mirror reflection or to the lens directly, worried about hiding the fact of her glass eye, or applying makeup for an evening's work. While these shots and her unhappy observations appear to highlight the parallels between filmmaking and prostitution (exhibition, exploitation, prevarication), it's important to remember that Aoi's performance in this particular context is never unmediated. In this way, even her self-presentation as a victim of male oppression is layered with another, aestheticized victimization. If O'Rourke's voice only occasionally intrudes, to ask a question from offscreen, the probing camera eye is constant. The film seems to "act out'' a creepily self-conscious voyeurism: Aoi covers herself with a sheet as the camera pans her body on a bed. This constant looking shapes the film's version of her sad story (her father abused her, her husband abandoned her when she was two months pregnant, now she's supporting an old mother and infant son). When she declares her hatred for "all men'' because they are "old, ugly, filthy, obscene,'' her tears appear genuine. But what does "genuine'' mean now, in front of a camera, talking to a man who has promised her land in exchange for her services? These frankly excruciating interviews with Aoi (her hopelessness is horrific and articulate) underline the ignorance of various clients. If the large percentage of Asian customers likely refused to be photographed, not so the brazen white men: interviewees are Dutch, Australian, and U.S. citizens with no face to lose. (While the film focuses specifically on bars where Caucasian men hang out, it manages to avoid mention of the industry's widespread racism.) A young American ponders the class issue in a bar as topless women dance behind him: "This is all they can really get because they haven't got any education.'' So what he and his buddies do, they reason, is "help them.'' Aoi's own concern with wanting to be a "good'' woman is framed by a familiar dichotomy, between the good village where her family lives (including a talkative elderly aunt), and the evil city where Aoi lives and works. This moralized opposition is reinforced by very old ideas about sexual difference, along with the titillation of interracial sex. In this fiction O'Rourke is the would-have-been hero. The melodramatic link between prostitution and love (O'Rourke might have saved her if only Aoi hadn't been so previously broken by other men) seems to overwhelm another story: that such romance is perpetuated by male customers - men like O'Rourke. In an effort to display her (or was it to "understand'' love?), he appropriates her virtuous vulnerability (he did have sex without a rubber, right?). But according to this movie, virtue for men (and filmmakers) is complex, always predicated on power that must be voluntarily abdicated or, barring that radical act, exposed. At one point the film includes footage that indicts his own parasitical activity. "I'm eating now,'' she says while slurping noodles. "It's nothing to do with your film.'' He keeps filming. She hisses at the camera. The last story is the strangest. Looking like one more object of an anthropological gaze, she is, after all, also a willful user who will continue to whore after the good artist has left town because, an end title says, "It is my fate.'' Fate? But the unseen coda of this film's fiction is this: O'Rourke says in an interview that as far as he knows, she is no longer a prostitute. Just whose fiction is at stake here anyway? Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University. Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author. This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.