MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Bangkok’: Powerful, Unsettling

The eyes of Yaiwalak Chonchanakun, a Thai prostitute whose nickname is “Aoi” (or “Sugar Cane”), have an almost unbearably poignant cast--and it’s probably because the left one is blind. Dark, liquid, unseeing, it seems dreamily detached from the rest of her face.

Aoi is the protagonist of Dennis O’Rourke’s great documentary “The Good Woman of Bangkok” (at the Guild). And, as she wanders through the streets--the seamy neons of the red-light district, the gaudy tourist hotels, the steamy bustle of the outdoor eateries--part of her seems absent. There’s a world inside her that seems, perhaps sentimentally, untouched. O’Rourke tries to suggest that inner realm with a sweet, wounding Mozart aria, sung by Dame Janet Baker, that soars above as she roams the streets or rides the shuttle to hotel dates.

The world behind the blind eye, and the more horrible world that assaults the seeing eye, that’s what “Woman” is all about. And though his title is borrowed from Brecht’s play, “The Good Woman of Setzuan,” O’Rourke doesn’t intend any Brechtian distance. This is a film about prostitution--one of the most powerful, memorable and unsettling ever on that theme--and its been done without barriers or protection.

The entire film is an act of exposure--of both Aoi and O’Rourke. And we’re never allowed to step very far back, either from Aoi’s hurt life or O’Rourke’s increasing shame at his part in it. He offered her a rice farm for her participation; the result of that offer forms the film’s bleak coda.

An illusion of unmediated reality is what we get here. O’Rourke describes “Good Woman” as a “fiction documentary” but only because he’s altered several details. And though he’s never on camera himself, as director-sound-recorder-cinematographer, he is the camera: an extra character. Aoi or the others talk to it desultorily or testily, tell it to move away, threaten it, or try to shield themselves from its gaze.

It’s a gaze not of penetration, but of love. It’s so obvious that O’Rourke is in love with Aoi as he films her. Yet it’s a willed love; O’Rourke planned this experience. After his 15-year marriage fell apart, he decided to go to Bangkok, live with a Thai prostitute, fall in love with her, and film the entire episode, single-handed. (He also decided, he says, to deliberately expose himself to the risk of AIDS. A year afterward, he still tests negative for the virus.)

So Bangkok was a symbolic choice: the ultimate “sin city” for jaded Westerners, a capital of sexual and economic exploitation. Similarly, Aoi was selected because she is an ultimate victim, rejected cruelly by the husband she loved, sending her whore’s wages back to her mother and two daughters in a poor Thai farming village. Nothing is glossed over. We see the dusty town, backdropping her aunt’s glum account of Aoi’s life. Toward the end of the film, when Aoi bitterly denounces all men as “cheats and liars,” and wishes them off the face of the Earth, the male-operated camera stays with her, unflinchingly.

Between Aoi’s blind eye and O’Rourke’s omnipresent camera, lies a world which, in its excess and cruelty, eerily mirrors our own. Is “The Good Woman of Bangkok” a tirade itself? A glib denunciation of exploitation, exploiting vice to draw a crowd? Not at all. Those who may denounce this movie for its displays of nudity or conversations about sex, will have spectacularly, and foolishly, missed its point. The film doesn’t ask us to revel in the fleshpots, but to comprehend them, to see the world through another’s eye--a loved one’s eyes--and reflect on its callousness and blind brutishness.

Great documentaries, such as “Nanook” or “Night and Fog,” usually come from an impassioned encounter between a filmmaker and a subject. If “The Good Woman of Bangkok” (Times-rated Mature for nudity and language) belongs in the same category, it’s because the film itself is an act of love: its ardor, evasions, hypocrisies, idealism, its unhealable wounds. As we see in “Bangkok,” if love, and everything else, are for sale, then the marketplace alone will always set the rules and exact its price.

‘The Good Woman of Bangkok’

A Roxie Releasing presentation. Producer, director, script writer, cinematographer, sound recorder Dennis O’Rourke. Associate producer Glenys Rowe. Editor Tim Litchfield. Music Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. With Yaiwalak Chonchanakun (Aoi). Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for nudity, language, strong adult themes.)