"The Good Woman of Bangkok"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
                  On "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM
                       December 12, 1992

   The Beach Theater in St. Petersburg Beach is playing a
disturbing "fictionalized documentary" film this week called "The
Good Woman of Bangkok," made by Australian filmmaker Dennis
O'Rourke.  It is about a Bangkok prostitute named Aoi and provides
a graphic panorama of the hopelessness and degradation of the Thai
women who work in the international sex industry that not just
Thailand but several other Asian countries promote as a way to
bring tourist dollars, marks and yen into their economies.

   An older Thai woman supposedly from the village that Aoi comes
from fills us in on the details of her early life.  She was from a
poor farming family and started school but, because she was
disabled (she's blind in one eye) she wasn't able to keep up and
dropped out to care for the other children and later to work as a
servant.  She married but was abandoned by her husband when she was
pregnant.  In order to earn enough money to support herself and her
son she moved to Bangkok to work in the sleazy bars that cater to
the planeloads of foreign men who come there where any kind of sex
you want is readily available and cheap.  (One of the oddities of
this film is that it focuses only on female prostitutes and gives
no inkling that male prostitution is also a booming business in
these places).  Her father, described as a spendthrift who spent
all his money on gambling and partying, often came to visit her
there and took money from her.

   Though the filmmaker's camera never shows him, O'Rourke makes
himself part of Aoi's story as well.  Through printed titles he
tells us that after he divorced his wife we went to Thailand, met
Aoi, decided to make this film about her, and that he bought her a
rice farm in payment for making the film--something she says she is
working and hoping for.

   I had a hard time with this film.  Firstly, it is difficult to
watch the sex shows and the ways in which the women display
themselves for the customers.  The attitudes of the men who come to
these meat markets for their "holidays" are utterly disgusting.
And, although the filmmaker's intention seems clearly to be to do
an expose of how this industry objectifies and destroys the women
who work in it, the film itself doesn't take a clear enough stance
in opposition to these practices.  I kept thinking that some men
might go see this film precisely in order to see the nude dancers
and as a kind of travelogue of the sensual delights awaiting them
if they avail themselves of the cheap plane fares from Japan and
Europe to Southeast Asia for such sex tours.  I kept wishing that
O'Rourke had done more of what Bonnie Sherr did in her film about
the sex industry in Toronto "Not A Love Story" in which one of the
women who was a participant in that industry became part of the
filmmaking team and we see her undergoing a change of attitude
about her own work and her colleagues as her feminist consciousness
is raised on the issues.

   In this film feminist consciousness and a feminist (or economic
or political) analysis of the situation of these women is utterly
lacking.  (If you want to read one you might look for starters at
Cynthia Enloe's book "Bananas, Beaches and Bases"). Though O'Rourke
means well, and though much of the film is devoted to Aoi's first-
person recitations of her feelings about her life and her work, I
kept feeling that O'Rourke represented to her just one more trick
who was paying her for her time and who, therefore, deserved to get
whatever he wanted from her--only this one was kinkier than most,
for he only wanted her to talk about her life.  In these talks she
makes it clear that she thinks that it's her responsibility to give
the customer whatever he's paying her for.  And even though these
sequences seem to be giving her a chance to speak in her own voice,
my reaction, at least, was that they further serve to objectify her
as she once again provides a man with what gives him pleasure,
i.e., footage for his film.

   In an epilogue O'Rourke returns to Thailand and to the rice farm
he had given Aoi after a year only to find that she's back in
Bangkok plying her trade.  Again there's no exploration of why this
romanticized dream of "saving" her did not work except for her own
hopeless words to the effect that "This is my fate."  A true expose
might have delved more deeply into the ideology and politics that
make this "her fate."

   For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.