Film Reviews

Bangkok Girl

Bangkok Girl is a documentary by a young Canadian film-maker, Jordan Clark. It is an intimate portrait of a 19 year old bargirl, Plah, who has worked in Bangkok’s infamous Patpong district since the age of 13.

The main development we follow through the film is how Jordan Clark gradually “courts” Plah in various locations. This is not the sort of courting she experiences from other Westerners. Jordan wants something else. He keeps his camera focused on her constantly – probably hoping to pierce through her smiling façade and find the "truth" at some stage. 

The film ends with a shocking revelation about Plah’s fate one week after the end of Jordan’s explorations with his camera – when he had safely returned to Canada with rolls and rolls of film footage. This aspect makes me feel uneasy about the whole of Jordan’s project.

It is clear from the film’s narrative that Jordan has been paying Plah’s barfines as he takes her on excursions to public parks, goes on river rides and visits her home. Jordan’s aim is to explore Plah’s background. Like the Nazi dentist in the film The Marathon Man he drills into the parts of Plah’s psyche that has open nerve-endings. He successfully changes her demeanour from a playful and smiling girl doing an act with a customer to that of an individual with an emotional and painful expression on her face.

She reveals to him how at the age of seven her father abandoned her – never to see her again. She tells the story of how her “stepmother” grabbed her hand and put it into a pot of boiling water – which led to her having her fingers amputated. The film director does go some way to explain how people with disabilities have few options in Thai society and also how women with a disadvantaged background similar to Plah often end up in the nightlife industry. In that sense the film succeeds in making the viewer empathise thoroughly with its main character. 

However, it is obvious from the film’s storytelling that Jordan Clark has become a close confidant of Plah during the time this film was shot. I find it a bit disturbing that we never see Jordan and Plah together – that we never see how they interacted. As many people will know Thai women do not usually reveal the most personal aspects of their lives until late in a “relationship”. Some people may say that girls working in the nightlife industry will tell “sob-stories” in order to elicit sympathy from their customers, but anyone watching this film will see that Plah’s personal recollections are hurtful to her and only told to the camera due to a great degree of familiarity with the interviewer or continuous questioning.

This film is disturbing in the direct portrayal it gives of the Farangs whom Plah mixes with on a daily basis. The director obviously pursues a certain bias in who it portrays as victims and villains. The boisterous ramblings of a drunken Brit on the streets of Patpong turn extra seedy and exploitative when contrasted with Plah’s daily life and circumstances.

However, the film is also disturbing in a more subtle way. Unlike the Farangs featured in the film, Jordan Clark has not “exploited” Plah for sex, but has he exploited her as an easy choice of subject for his first foray into documentary-making?

This is a young and possibly good-looking Farang who has shown a degree of interest in a disabled teenage girl that she may never have experienced before. Due to starting work at an early age in bars and having a misshapen hand she may never have experienced a true relationship with a caring Thai man, equally so with her Farang customers.

The constant probing into her past horrors – who would benefit from that? Obviously, the Farang has “created” a touching and moving documentary that will reinforce Western attitudes that certain Farangs are scum and elicit pity for these abused girls. Reviewers and audiences may applaud his skill in bringing this subject to the fore in such a poignant manner, but Plah may just have been left with an open emotional sore that this passing-through Farang has chosen to grind his camera into for weeks or months. Would the physical molestation this girl has been subjected to for years be more immediately devastating than the emotional wrenching Jordan Clark had been subjecting her to? Anyways, the film ends with a tragic revelation about Plah’s life and I feel that viewers should keep in mind this question at that stage . . .

Jordan Clark’s “holier-than-thou” attitude is undermined by his failure to truly recognise or question his own role in this heart-wrenching tale. Totally bypassing any reference as to why the film ends with tragic consequences should make viewers question the methods of the maker(s) of the documentary.

This is a moving clip of Plah as she speaks of her depression and ends it with one of those famous Thai smiles – clear evidence that this characteristic smile can express as much melancholy as it can joy:

Mail Order Wife

“Mail Order Wife” is a funny and original take on relationships between Western men and Asian women. Supposedly, the film is about an American man beginning a relationship with a Burmese woman. However, the themes and issues the film revolves around are equally relevant to the more numerous Thai-Farang relationships in today’s world. I suspect the film producers chose Burma instead of Thailand due to the brilliant Chinese actress, Eugenia Yuan, who plays Lichi. She would have found it difficult to fake speaking Thai.

The film is shot in a documentary style with a young director who ends up playing an even greater personal part in the documentary than its original Farang protagonist. The film is not a real documentary, however. It is a “Mockumentary” making fun of the whole genre and the eagerness some younger innovative documentary makers have for partaking in their subjects’ lives. I am not aware whether the producers of this film are parodying the Louis Theroux genre of documentaries where he took the mickey out of various people around the globe leading “odd” lifestyles. Louis would often feature himself more than the people he was investigating. A memorable scene from one of his documentaries was when he was doing a mock Elvis-duet with “Lake Palmer” – an Englishman visiting Bangkok to marry a Thai woman in record speed. In “Mail Order Wife” documentary-maker Andrew Gurland gets to play a much greater personal part than Louis ever would, however.

The film begins with an introduction to the life of Adrian Martinez, a doorman living in Queens, New York.

Adrian has decided to order a wife through an agency and proudly shows the mail order catalogue-photo that attracted him to Lichi.

With a limited amount of correspondence and a few faked photos he tries to make his prospective wife believe he is a successful and accomplished man.

Soon he succeeds in bringing Lichi to the United States where they are duly married. Again, like its equivalent Little Britain sketch, the mockumentary likes to make out that Western men can look through a catalogue and pick the women they want and just wait to pick her up at the airport. This is, of course, an exaggeration riding hopscotch over American and UK “Visa-Realities”. It is what makes such long-distance and cross-cultural relationships fascinating and bizarre to people in general. To believe that some people try solving one of life’s great conundrums – how to find a partner for life - by such an easy fix is both tragic and hilarious.

The film does well in the way it has presented Adrian’s and Lichi’s “courtship”. The exaggeration and Adrian’s efforts in picturing himself beside his car etc. highlight how some Thai-Farang relationships can seem based on a crude display of wealth on the part of the Farang thereby attracting the kind of female he may later come to condemn and detest – the gold-digger. Maybe most men do not identify with their perceived wealth as grotesquely as Adrian does - but some come close. In a long distance relationship based on telephone or internet correspondence perceptions are everything (funnily Adrian is pre-digital using a typewriter instead) and the film lays a good foundation for later events in the way it succinctly shows the prelude to Lichi’s arrival.

The awkwardness of Lichi’s arrival in the airport is hilarious. Adrian tries a few Chinese sentences but soon gives up after receiving no response. He then quickly ushers off his bride-to-be while inspecting her body leeringly.

(It is quite a contrast to the happy airport re-union of the Danish couple seen here.)

When Lichi arrives at her new home Adrian wastes no time in instructing her on her duties. He teaches her how to cook Chilli and clean the toilet.

Soon after we also see how he has instructed her to engage in a special kind of shaving wherein she sits astride his laidback body.

The happy couple are then left by the documentary team. The next time we hear from them is when Lichi turns up at the documentary makers door. She has some private video tapes to show him. They depict how Adrian has expanded Lichi’s repertoire from being a house slave to also being a sex slave starring in home-porn movies.

The “good” Andrew decides to save Lichi. He has a Farang girlfriend, but soon dedicates his time to training Lichi in cookery skills so she can get a work as a chef and thus get a visa.

At a dinner party this harmonious relationship between saviour and person-to-be-saved is spoilt when it is revealed that Andrew has had sex with Lichi. Lichi believes that marriage must be the next thing, but Andrew soon teaches her in a condescending manner that in America there is such a thing as “just sex”.

Lichi then goes back to live with Adrian. Soon we see that Andrew is getting obsessed with Lichi, although he is still expressing that this is due to concerns about Adrian. Andrew is seen hiding in a car and taking candid video of Adrian’s house.

Andrew initiates secret rendezvous with Lichi which she is happy to attend. It is funny to see the way the film-makers have shown Adrian’s and Andrew’s different approaches to Thai-Farang relationships. Adrian is clearly just an ogre who makes no apologies for having bought what he considers his personal slave – it is a fine caricature of a sort of man who unfortunately does exist in real life and whom people in Thai-Farang relationships may meet. Andrew, on the other hand, is the educated guy who can see the exploitation that Lichi has to suffer. His role as righteous saviour soon develops into that of a sort of immature and naïve romantic showing nervous tension as he enters what he thinks is a courtship of Lichi.

Andrew decides to save Lichi and in the process of moving her things out of Adrian’s house we see how he destroys Adrian’s possessions to underline the kind of contempt he supposedly feels for this man.

As Lichi and Andrew begin a life together it becomes clear that Andrew has come to view Lichi as someone he has saved. He considers himself much better than Adrian which means that he should not really worry about how he treats Lichi. Relatively speaking, he is not doing much harm by sleeping with Lichi while still having a relationship with a Farang woman because Adrian almost forced Lichi to have sex with a snake.

Similarly, when Andrew tells Lichi to remove all her "pig" paraphernalia and asserting his dominance of their living space it is not controlling behaviour as Adrian used to make Lichi perform minute slave tasks in bizarre ways. The way Andrew considers himself better than his fellow-farang and how it makes him feel exonerated of any guilt regarding his treatment of Lichi is very interesting and perceptive.

Lichi is no angel, however. Soon Andrew is exposed to her rants and hysteric outbursts. He reacts to this in an abnormally calm way. Instead of taking her serious and arguing with her he ignores her and chooses, instead, to show videoclips of their relationship to film-students and then asking them the hilarious question: “So do you think this relationship will last?” – as if the relationship is some detached object he is still studying rather than an actual personal issue to him. This shows that Andrew is almost as bizarre an individual as Adrian.

Andrew then discovers that Lichi has left and gone back to Burma. He is thrown into emotional turmoil for a while and only gets his act back together when he begins talking to Adrian again. Together they hatch a plan to lure Lichi back to the USA.

Adrian has spotted that Lichi has put a new advert in the “mail-order bride” catalogue under the name Mai Lee. They dress up an old geezer and make fake letters to lure her back. Supposedly, Andrews objective in getting her back is to talk things through with her – ie. How could she leave a great guy like him? Adrian apparently has a plan to torture her physically (as shown by a deleted scene on the DVD), which Andrew perversely has agreed to.

One of the funniest things in the film is how Adrian and Andrew relate to each other. It a relationship based on contempt and frequent fights. It is funny reflection on the real world of Farangs in relationships with Thais. It seems true that many disparate characters are brought together purely through their relationship with Thais. These individuals would probably not mix in other circumstances. There are many stories of incessant and petty hostilities between expats living in Thailand and it seems equally true that Farangs still residing in the West find it difficult to get along and can engage in futile battles with each other online or in person. Surely, these funny circumstances seem peculiarly true for Thai-Farang couples. I have not heard stories of Western women in relationships with males of a different culture having similar “issues”.

Andrew is clearly contemptuous of Adrian and can see no similarity between himself and this ogre. Part of the contempt lies in the fact that they have both been with the same woman. Andrew will not accept that he could in any way be seen in the same light as Adrian – surely Lichi had a different relationship with him? 

In the film it shows that she didn’t really. When she arrives in the US airport for the 2^nd (?) time she plays the same act as a demure Asian. The old geezer wastes no time, however, in taking advantage and gives her a kiss . . . 

Instead of taking Lichi to a yacht the old geezer takes Lichi to a Motel for some “romance”. Adrian and Andrew gatecrash this procedure and Andrew gets his chance to find out what the situation with Lichi really is. It seems Lichi had finished playing an act with Andrew and tells him that he was a “loser” just like Adrian and other guys she has met through “mail order” agencies.

The story ends with Lichi returning to Burma – lonely but emerging as the strongest character in the film despite this. In the film’s denouement Andrew and Adrian play around like children and Adrian proudly declares that “overall it was a success – what a great country in which an average son of a bitch like me can take on a conniving whore like Lichi and send her home in shame”.

The film, however, has done more to expose the likes of Adrian and Andrew than exposing the “conniving” ways of Lichi. Although, it is clear that all her past behaviours have been based on planning for material success or well-being that is somehow overshadowed or excused by the bizarre behaviours of her two suitors.

“Mail Order Wife” is highly recommended. It is a funny and clever film, and for someone in a Thai-Farang relationship there will be many things that will seem extra hilarious due to how true they really are.

The film is only available in Region 1 format – it can be purchased in the UK but you will need a multi-region player to view it.