The Good Woman of Bangkok

The film's beginning is highly stylized, like a fiction film, or even more specifically, like a soap opera. It is melodramatic and contrived. Come to find out by the end of the film, soap operas are kind of an analogy for this woman's story. Throughout she experiences and recalls tragedy, drama, deceit, betrayal etc. etc. The "good woman" is not actually from Bangkok, but from a village near by. She is forced into prostitution by a series of male oriented bad happenstances, including her husband's abuse and eventual jilting of her, and her father's gambling. The two main men in her life have broken her in a way that has made her extremely depressed and even suicidal. Ironically, she is "forced" into the sex industry where she must cater to men. She despises men, after all, they are the source of all her misery.

She despises all men, and the filmmaker is a man. This is what gives this film depth. Aoi is a prostitute, forced into the industry because of the male ineptitude in her life, a tragic tale, but a common and familiar tale nonetheless. It is the construct of the film that separates it from its pervasiveness. This male filmmaker comes into Aoi's life, presumably as a john, and asks more from her than just sex (though the subject is never directly addressed, one can assume he engaged in a sexual relationship with her at least to start). She agrees to let him film her life, and he promises to compensate her.

Now, because of documentary film's subjective nature (beyond just a cinematic object) it is, "less a thing than an experience"(Sobcheck). An audience might not be able to identify with Aoi on an emotional recall level, but the combination of the pervasiveness of her story, coupled with the knowledge we all have of betrayal and of the importance of assessing new relationships allows a more empathetic understanding of Aoi's personal story through the film experience. At the same time we are learning through interviews about her past, we are learning about her cinematic presence. Who is Dennis O'Rourke (the filmmaker), what does he want from her? Although he starts off by stating, in text, what he is looking for "love to be both banal and profound," by the end of the film he has passed judgment on her lifestyle, constantly saying to Aoi he wants her to get out of the business. He even buys her a rice farm (the thing she said she would need to be able to quit). In the end, the film still seems exploitative, has remnants of unintentional post-colonialism, and is brimming with naivete. Just when one thinks there might be a happy ending to the story, there is a sort of afterword where by O'Rourke tells the audience that even though he bought her a rice farm, a year later (after he LEFT her) he finds her working in a dingy sex shop again.

What responsibility do documentary filmmakers have to their subjects? In an interview with Sergei Dvortsevoy he says, "documentary film, at least the kind of creative documentary that I make, is a strange genre, one that doesn’t help people much. When I make a film I don’t make it to help people. I help them while I am shooting, but the film itself cannot help them, and in fact sometimes it harms them, makes the situation even worse. Making a film about someone doesn’t necessarily bring them happiness." Something to at least think about.


cheers


The Good Woman of Bangkok (Dennis O'Rourke, 1992)

Sobcheck, Vivian. "Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience." ed. Gaines, Jane, and Michael Renov. 1999. Collecting visible evidence. U of Minnesota Press, July.

Interview by Andrea Slovakova and Bara Stefanova.