WHORES GLORY

It’s tough watching Michael Glawogger’s documentary without dwelling (possibly too much) on one’s own moral viewpoint on prostitution. I’m not sure why he made the film even, apart from the fact that the women were there plying their trade anyway so why shouldn’t he record this? And at the end of this voyeuristic viewing, I’m not sure if we are expected to change our opinions because we know that the movie alone will certainly not change how they continue to practice the oldest profession of the world in any of the three continents he filmed.

First was Bangkok where the girls in the Brothel sit in the aptly named Fish Tank with a number stuck on their skimpy outfits and try to look alluring. On the other side of the glass, the male customers are being cajoled into making their choice so that they can whisk them away upstairs and do whatever they fancy. The girls first pray that they will be picked and then hope that the men will get it over and done with quickly so that they can get back in the fish tank to meet their next client.

This is a very disciplined environment where everyone knows where they stand and where the girls get on with each other and their biggest worry is that the Brothel Owner will keep bringing in newer and younger girls making the competition to be picked even tougher. The saddest (and oddest) part of their lives was that on their nights off they would go out to other Bars to pick up Hostess Boys and pay for them to make out with them. A perverse role reversal that I didn’t quite appreciate.

The next destination is the narrow hallways of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s red-light district off which runs a warren of endless small rooms with one shared water faucet and is inhabited with very young girls plying their trade. Some have been ‘bought’ by Madams and then they are expected to work for nothing until their ‘debt’ is paid before being allowed to keep a percentage of the small amount of money the poor clients can be persuaded to part with. The Madams are fierce and rule their girls with an iron fist and will pimp them out to anyone who will pay. There is a particularly harrowing scene when a teenage girl details all the weird clients she has serviced that day.

There is no way out for these girls who will keep going as long as they can find clients or are actually thrown out by the landlord when he comes around to collect his rent each day before all the power is shut off at night.

The third section is in a rural open-air market in Mexico where cars cruise by at night eyeing up all the women in open doorways who shout out all the services that they will perform and at what price. After Bangladesh, this whole street scene seems so much less claustrophobic and threatening, and the Mexican girls/women seem much more independent. Here the director steps beyond just observing them from a distance and films a young ranch-hand who hooks up with one of the more experienced women and she tries to get him off in the 20 minutes that his limited budget can afford. It leaves nothing to our imagination except the question as to why he found it necessary to include it in this film.

Surprisingly enough the one practice that I assumed would be prevalent is not covered until
the final scene in which two of the Mexican women (one naked from the waist down) are lounging on a bed smoking crack heroin. It’s a sad image on which to end a depressing and questionable movie.

P.S. I found it much easier to relate to Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman’s ‘BORN INTO BROTHELS’ their Oscar Award Winning Documentary who’s unsentimental look at the children of Calcutta’s red-light district came about when Zana Briski started to make a difference there with her photography classes that gave them the option of a way out. Rent this instead.

Posted by queerguru at 15:41

Labels: documentary

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