The Good Woman of Bangkok

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These scenes of the raucous night life get intercut with the shots of the still camera that captures a soft spoken Aoi, while she showers herself privately, that is so unlike her on stage existence. The shots of Aoi’s unhappy observations successfully highlights the three different analogous contexts of prostitution and filmmaking namely prevarication, exhibition and exploitation (Jayamanne, 2001). One should remember that Aoi’s performances are never unmediated. Also her representation as a stringent victim of male subjugation is layered with another aspect of asthecized victimization. While both the idea and construct do not happen to be relatively innovative, yet ‘the woman’ captured in the film offers a cultural insight and a rather painful exposure of the reality she suffers from.

The route to the portrayed insight is oblique. The final credits tell us that the movie is a “documentary fiction” which portrays Dennis O’Rourke’s condescension towards the traditional aspects of “truth in a box.” (Nieporent, 2010). The film has explicit use of documentary conventions like the excursions with a handheld camera through the different dingy Thai bars in the hollow of the dark night, the talking heads, and most importantly the elaborately captured empathy of the viewers for Aoi. It makes the documentary appear both ambiguous yet cool. However, the surfacing moralizing in the movie at times can be considered lumpy.

Aoi’s concern about wanting to be the “good woman” frames the recognizable dichotomy between her home in the village and the city that she works in. the opposed moralizations gets reinforced with the help of ancient ideas about sexual differences and the melodramatic association of love and sex. O’Rourke’s could have been Aoi’s hero and savior had she not been broken time and over by other men. There are a lot of documentaries that teaches the viewer more about the makers rather than the subjects in it. This documentary is a perfect example of the statement. The end credits happen to be extremely honest and they leave their resonance all throughout the movie encouraging the viewers to ask questions. It does not make the viewers dwell in the flesh pots. However, the portrayal of the good woman does comprehend the viewer to look at her world with the eyes of a lover while reflecting on the blind and callous brutishness in it. As it is in Bangkok, if everything else along with love is on sale, then it is the marketplace alone that makes the rule and sets the price.

References:

Berry, C., Hamilton, A., Jayamanne, L. and O'rourke, D. (1997). The Filmmaker and the prostitute. Sydney: Power Publications.

Jayamanne, L. (2001). Toward cinema and its double. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rieker. M. (1993). “Narrating the post colonial Everyday: An interrogation of The Good Woman of Bangkok” Visual Anthropology review 9, no. 1:122.

Nieporent, B. (2010). Movie Review - Good Woman of Bangkok, The - eFilmCritic. [online] Available at: http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=5894 [Accessed: 11 Feb 2014].