There is no such thing as a bargain basement when it comes to getting yourself a mail order bride as the lonely men featured in Jonathon Naducci’s compelling and somewhat sad documentary soon realized. He chooses to follow five men from the US who have been unable to find a replacement for their ex wives, or in one case have never yet managed to lose their relationship virginity. They all are prepared to hand over several thousands of dollars and transaction fees to an online dating agency called ‘A Foreign Affair’ who have promised to find them the Ukrainian woman of their dreams. Or at the very least one who will pretend to go along with the idea if there is the possibility of marriage and the chance to leave Ukraine for a better life elsewhere.
The Agency is run by an American man and his younger Russian wife with a website with pages and pages of scantily clad women in very provocative poses that looks something more akin to an old-fashioned soft-porn site. The men, all middle-aged and overweight and hardly good looking, get to chose their fantasy woman to start corresponding with at $10 per email (the charge is evidently for ‘translation’ something that Google will do for free). Then when they want to take it one step further they join one of the Agency’s tours to meet a whole bevy of women at different social gatherings in Ukraine.
Some of the men harbor desires to meet up with the women that have invested several hundreds of $10 emails in, but often they fail to turn up at the organized gatherings giving rise to the possibility that they may never have existed in the first place. Those that do find ‘love’ at first sight on the dance floor with a women who doesn’t understand a word they are saying, enjoy some ‘passion’ which seems to end abruptly when the money does too. Both dry up at the same time.
Naducci also followed the scenario of an completely hopeless Australian man who seemed unable to even notice the total disinterest of the woman he pursued and he even took her and her two children to Bali for a vacation. She returned her thanks by marrying him although she never let him get more than a peck on the cheek before she left him for good. He actually received a letter from a friend of his ‘wife’s’ who warned him that she was only after his money, but he still refused to believe that this wasn’t a match made in heaven, let alone Kiev.There were some successes and two of the men found brides who they eventually managed to get visas for to take them home to the U.S. Although to be fair, one of the couples was such a glaringly odd miss-matched pair it seems inconceivable that their relationship would last once the bride had her own legal status to remain in the US.
Naducci carefully does not question either the legitimacy or the validity of ‘A Foreign Affair’ or other agencies like this, but it is obvious that the whole concept/business is riddled with abuse and deception, even though it is never clear if the Agencies are complicit with girls or not. What is sad that is unfairly promising hope to some very desperate and painfully naive men who think that the only way they will ever get a happy relationship is to buy it from a group of women who may be content with far less than their American counterparts.
Labels: 2014, documentary
