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The Good Woman of Bangkok
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1. The
Street Angel and the Badman (1992)
In
1964, Jean-Luc Godard dreamed aloud (not for the first time) about a kind of
filmmaking unconstrained by the protocols of genre or good form. “Is the cinema
catalogued as a whole or a part? If you make a Western, no psychology; if you
make a love-story, no chases or fights; if you make a light comedy, no
adventures; and if you have adventures, no character analysis”. Then, in
relation to his latest project, he added: “Woe unto me, then, since I have just
made [a film] where subjects are seen as objects, where pursuits by taxi
alternate with ethnological interviews, where the spectacle of life finally
mingles with its analysis”. (1)
That
film reached the world, later in 1964, as A
Married Woman (Une femme mariée)
– although Godard wanted the more universal title of The Married Woman. Whatever one now makes of Godard and his
extraordinary influence on contemporary cinema, it seems crucial, in retrospect,
that his vision of a film “delighted to be only what it is” should centre
itself so completely on an investigation by man of woman. Indeed, something
unmistakably judgmental and constrictive inexorably creeps into the Godardian operating definition of a free cinema: “The
cinema … can be everything at once, both judge and litigant”. (2)
Dennis
O’Rourke is another filmmaker who demands the right to unconstrained artistic
freedom, and then turns in an ethnographic movie (a “documentary fiction film”,
as his credits proudly declare) with a suspiciously sweeping title (to which I
shall return): The Good Woman of Bangkok.
Naturally, the alarm bells starting ringing around film culture from the moment
of its first public appearance – and for some pretty good reasons. A
privileged, white, male documentary filmmaker playing “both judge and litigant”
over the body of a random Thai prostitute?
O’Rourke’s
justification of the project comes in several guises: that it is a provocation
to Australian documentary cinema; that it is a daring, self-revelatory testament
putting his own masculinity on the line (since the very idea was to let himself
fall in love with his subject, Yaiwalak Chonchanakun, known as Aoi); and that it is a work of art, in a specific tradition.
Clearly, The Good Woman of Bangkok is
a film that deserves a lot more than a knee-jerk leftist dismissal. What it
demands, on all its levels, is a thoroughgoing,
properly critical dismissal!
For
O’Rourke as for Godard, cinema is a matter of a whole, not its segregated parts
– “my starting point, of course, is that it’s all storytelling; it’s all
cinema, good or bad, fiction or non-fiction”. (3) His artistic aim – laudable
enough in itself – is to make a work as fully and complexly formed as any fiction,
starting from a documentary base. And it is true that the film achieves, on
several levels, a coherence of organisation and unity
of purpose comparable to that of a narrative (or to a Frederick Wiseman
documentary, although he would
doubtless never go near a subject quite like this, quite in this way).
A
fully contrived work of film art creates both a unique world, and a special
meaning for that world; in Pascal Bonitzer’s terms,
it both “represents and relates, figures and shows” simultaneously. (4) Strange
as it may sound, probably the highest praise one could give O’Rourke’s film is
that it entirely succeeds is conjuring a filmic world (out of the real world)
which is relentlessly ugly and depressing. It is an insular, flattened, almost
timeless experiential chamber: no variation, no light or shade, no glimpse of
anything resembling daily normality ever intrudes into this hellish Asian pit
of bars, hotels, prostitutes and their clients.
Even
more forcefully, this fictive world acquires a universally symbolic and
metaphoric status: it is a picture of the whole world, and nowhere more so than
on the level of its gender relations. Time and again, O’Rourke selects his
documentary fragments of speech and gesture to reinforce the notion that the
horrible men we see stand in for all men, since all men are (apparently) the same; and ditto for the women. The
world-view thus conjured is hardly an edifying one: men are barbarous, immoral,
driven by sheer lust; marriage is just another form of prostitution for women;
women suffer all this animal sex for the sake of one day buying a home or an
education for their children ... And, however one responds to the film’s
nihilism on this existential plane, there’s absolutely no doubt that on any
political level, O’Rourke’s gesture – dropping into an exotic tourist getaway
and then ignoring all social specificity in order to adumbrate a personal
vision of sexual hell – is almost unbelievably blinkered and reactionary.
An
index of the film’s frightful artistic coherence can be found in the up-front
role played by the camera itself. O’Rourke is not beyond including the
occasional frisson (by conventional documentary standards) of an on-screen
participant suddenly exposing, mid-scene, the presence of the camera or the
filmmaker. But, for the most part, his camera never even pretends to the usual
documentary invisibility; on the contrary, it becomes an integral part of this
ugly world of sexual exchanges, soliciting the poses, performances, come-ons
and self-justifications of anyone who does not immediately flee its voracious
eye. O’Rourke has decried what he calls the “theological”, holier-than-thou
pretensions of most documentary film; his (surely no less pretentious) search
for a lasciviously sinful, participatory cinema at least serves to remind us of
Jean-Pierre Gorin’s soberingly anti-idealist summation of the medium: “The cinema has always been fucked by
everybody ... it’s lying out there in the ring of the circus, being fucked over
by the clowns, by the acrobats, by the performing seals”. (5)
In
the film’s press kit, O’Rourke states that it is “an attempt to describe ...
and to conflate, what is so banal about sex with a measure of what is profound”.
The banal sordidness of the project’s representations is obvious; the intended
profundity signals itself on another level: in the showy, poetic flourishes –
all the arresting compositions, slow motion and classical music employed to
transfigure and redeem this ugly world for a fleeting moment or two, drawing it
nearer to the contemplative, sanctified realm of art cinema. (The film’s
slightly more modernist poetic touch comes in the quasi Warholian,
oft-used video footage of Aoi, drugged and/or drunk,
confessing to the camera, her glass eye disconcertingly evident.) This poetry,
too, belongs at the heart of the film’s system, and cues immediately the
artistic tradition from which it is very consciously shaped.
“It’s
not new for an artist – a man – to connect with prostitutes in order to say
something about himself and male-female relationships”, says O’Rourke, placing
himself in a line with (among others) Stendhal, Gaughin,
Alberto Moravia and Walter Benjamin. Now there’s a Great Tradition for you! But
it opens up a wider frame: of men’s depiction of sublime women, which in cinema includes films as diverse as Roberto
Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1951), Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964), Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and Ian Pringle’s Isabelle Eberhardt (1991). These heroines (whether missionaries, junkies, philosophers or
adventurers) are sublime because of their intense suffering, and their ecstatic
experience of being lost to themselves and the workaday love-and-sex world.
Filmic tales of prostitutes as veritable street angels (in the manner of Alexandre Dumas fils and his Marguerite Gauthier, Lady of the Camellias) form
a prominent part of this tradition, running from Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1928) to Marco Ferreri’s horrendous Tales
of Ordinary Madness (1983) via Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962).
(6)
Gérard Gozlan offered one summary of this sublimity in his
savage eulogy of the Catholic film theorist André Bazin:
“The best woman is a dead woman”. (7) Aoi herself
offers another when she says to O’Rourke, “You are the sky and I am the ground”.
Yet, as Bérénice Reynaud has brilliantly argued, the
relation of male filmmaker to female subject in this sublime mode is far more
than simply voyeuristic or fetishistic (although it is undeniably that, too).
(8) The sky and the ground remain separate, with one obviously standing over
and exploiting the other; yet there is also a complex interdependence, a
process of exchange at play, which O’Rourke is keen to magnify. In short, the
male artist in such a scenario is not content merely to present or adjudicate
on the sublime woman (although there is often, as here, a note of disapproval
or disappointment). Fundamentally, he comes into being as a sensitive soul
through his identification with this
fatal woman, an identification as passionate and reckless as it is ambivalent
and ultimately evasive.
O’Rourke
stakes a lot on the gamble that his film is excessively intimate, even
embarrassing – and thus a productive transgression of the norms of documentary
content and form. Like virtually every self-proclaimed independent filmmaker
today, O’Rourke is quick to distance himself from the majority of his
colleagues in the area of documentary – making mention of the “appallingly low”
level of “critical debate” that manifests itself in such conventionally overdetermined work. Yet one can validly question the depth
of O’Rourke’s own engagement in the not altogether new history of what he calls
“documentary fiction film”. For while he cites directors (for him, Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu) who instill a certain documentary-like quality into
their fictions, he seems unaware of the considerable traffic that has already
travelled the other way – from fiction into documentary – since (at least) the
first, wild ethnographic experiments of Jean Rouch in
the late 1940s.
An
attempt to clearly place The Good Woman of
Bangkok into a pertinent context of the most formally radical documentary fictions
of the previous decades inevitably diminishes its touted achievement. Indeed,
in this light, it can seem little more than a bundle of diverse, diffuse gestures
of innovation that have been better researched and explored elsewhere. There is
the lightly Brechtian angle of the self-reflexive
moments, the prosaic written titles, and the structuring, allegorical reference
to Brecht’s own The Good Person of
Szechwan (first known in English as The
Good Woman of Setzuan) – yet nothing approaching
the neo-Brechtian rigour of
filmmakers like Yvonne Rainer (Privilege,
1990) or Alexander Kluge (The Power of
Emotions, 1983). There is the attempt by the filmmaker to fully digest,
reflect on and restructure an experience that was in the first place
chaotically lived through as a complicit partner; yet no equivalent to the
complex, eloquent montage structures that mark the participatory essay-films of
Jean-Pierre Gorin (Routine Pleasures, 1987) or Robert Kramer (Our Nazi, 1984). There is the will to explode the documentary genre
via an almost psychodramatic immersion in a reality
which is itself a whirlwind of diverse and conflicting roles, masks, drives,
identities; yet none of the really scary thrills to be found in frankly avant-garde
documentaries by Rouch, Werner Herzog, Stan Brakhage (The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, 1971) or Peter Tammer (Journey to
the End of Night, 1982).
The
documentary-fiction genre that O’Rourke’s film most closely resembles is that
of the diary film, which is sometimes
discussed within a broader category of personal
cinema – especially operative in the sphere of avant-garde production, as
the early 1990s Rotterdam Film Festival retrospectives devoted to “Cinema
Narcissus” and “The Diary Film” amply demonstrated. O’Rourke’s personal cinema
is of a particular sort: we could call it crisis filmmaking, filmmaking as confession and therapy – perhaps even, finally, as redemption.
Thus, the filmmaker-as-badman goes to the very end of
the world and to the very edge of his transgressive,
sinful experience in order to live out the extremes of his critical condition;
he comes clean, hoping that, for his honesty, he will be absolved by the
cinema-watching public. (Even as poetic logic suggests that this public,
sitting in the dark, is more likely to identify with the perverse contents of
the confession itself!)
It
is in this dream of total, naked intimacy between filmmaker and film-viewer
that we must locate the impossibility, indeed the madness of a certain
conception of personal cinema. For not only is there the problem of what
interferes between a filmmaker’s direct, immediate experience and his/her
capacity to record or convey any of it with a camera and a tape recorder; there
is also the more profound issue of what then mediates as cultural communication
between the film that is completed and the audience who receives it. The fatal
question must always be: what unheard-of personal truth can possibly be
broached, and then revealed, in the process of constructing a film that is to
be consumed, ultimately, in the light of all preceding films?
A
terrible truth haunts even the most intimate confessions of personal cinema.
When one sees extreme examples of the genre like Wim Wenders’ Lightning
Over Water (1980), Dirk De Bruyn’s Conversations With My Mother (1990) or
Nick Deocampo’s Revolutions
Happen Like Refrains in a Song (1987), one can be struck by the fact that
they reveal nothing; nothing, that is, beyond a messy weave of postures,
clichés and fictional constructs cut all too obviously from the cloth of public
culture. Pure alienation, in other words: the understanding of oneself through
others, the experiencing of one’s own situation through what has already been
written and filmed, rehearsed and codified – without the slightest apprehension
that this is the case.
The Good Woman of
Bangkok is in many respects a tame, compromised, half-hearted instance of personal
cinema. But it at least provides another instructive example of this phenomenon
endemic to the genre: it inadvertently offers us the spectacle of alienation
mistaking itself for sublimity.
2.
Postscript: The Two O’Rourkes (1994)
Preliminary
Note: when I was asked (by a committee including O’Rourke himself) for
permission to reprint the above text in the anthology The Filmmaker and
the Prostitute: Dennis O’Rourke’s The
Good Woman of Bangkok (Sydney: Power
Institute, 1996) edited by Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton & Laleen Jayamanne, I agreed on the
condition that the following Postscript – which addresses Berry’s critique of
my argument – also be included. That condition was refused – unfairly, I
thought – so I withheld my essay from the book. This Postscript appears
publicly for the first time on this website.
In
his book A Bit On the Side: East-West
Topographies of Desire, Chris Berry comments that my evocation of the “confessional
film” as a way of discussing The Good
Woman of Bangkok “disavow[s] O’Rourke-the-filmmaker’s explicit positioning
of the film as a ‘documentary fiction’ as distinct from the truth claims of
conventional documentary”, and that, “[a]mong other
things, O’Rourke-in-Australia’s decision to accompany O’Rourke-in-Bangkok’s
activities with Janet Baker singing a Mozart aria seems to have escaped” my
attention. (9) Although I think it is perfectly evident that my 1992 article
overlooked neither of the aspects that Berry mentions, it may be worth saying a
little more in defense of my critical approach.
First,
I think it unwise to ignore the marked confessional aspect of the film. O’Rourke,
after all, goes on about it in virtually every public proclamation he issues
(random snippet from the Cinema Papers interview: “The film is a statement of love”). Some of the most extravagantly positive
accounts of the film have responded favourably to
just this quality. Martha Ansara, for instance, not
only praised the film as a Brecht-influenced “challenge to the present state of
documentary filmmaking” (as Berry cites); she also waxed lyrical in Filmnews about it
being “about more than prostitution; it is a film about love, about emotional
pain and dignity, and about destruction and survival. To me, it is so obviously
therefore a film about Dennis”. (10) I am fully aware that a film-text and what
the director says about it are not the same thing. But it is equally true that
the latter often has the power to publicly frame, amplify and overdetermine the former in a decisive way – and I believe
this happened for many viewers with The
Good Woman of Bangkok.
Second,
and more importantly: a point about the (predominantly masculine) “confessional
genre” itself. I do not see this genre as consisting of raw, unworked audiovisual
documents torn straight from the camera and hurled onto a screen (as Berry
seems to think I do). Many confessional documentary-fictions (such as Ross McElwee’s Time
Indefinite [1993]) in fact present extremely worked, formed, manipulated
accounts of their original diaristic material.
Post-production procedures of editing, music overlay and carefully composed narrational voice-over are (routinely) central and determining
of filmic meaning. But – here’s my real point – this working of the initial
material, in another time, place and context, does not in an automatic way
guarantee any measure of
contradiction, richness, ambiguity, ambivalence or complexity (the very
qualities that Berry claims for The Good
Woman of Bangkok).
What
the filmmaker-in-editing does with the footage of the filmmaker-in-scene may
create no cleavage, open no productive space in the text whatsoever;
post-production decisions may be totally of a piece with the impulses and
aspirations that drove the shooting. This is exactly what I think O’Rourke
aimed at and succeeded with in The Good
Woman of Bangkok, leading to what I called its “frightful coherence”. And
it is at this point that Chris’ enabling distinction between the two O’Rourkes breaks down, and I find myself agreeing with Owen
Richardson in his review of A Bit On the
Side: “O’Rourke continues to be a filmmaker whatever else he does; sex
tourist and filmmaker are not mutually exclusive roles. He is a filmmaker
before, during and after he is a sex tourist”. Richardson asserts that Berry
gives his distinction between the two O’Rourkes “more
than it can bear”. (11)
While
I respect Berry’s detailed account of The
Good Woman of Bangkok, I, too, remain unconvinced by his argument.
Something is missing from this textual analysis with its shuffling of split enunciative positions, here-and-there dialectics, and
emblems of a fabulous, socio-personal ambivalence: something of the real sensibility of O’Rourke’s film, the
living, material gestalt of how it breathes, looks and feels, and the fully
conscious (rather than obscurely unconscious) dynamic of people’s viewing
responses. Ansara, in her passionately undistanced, fannish response,
gets closer than Berry to this sensibility when she admits that, for her, O’Rourke
belongs to “the best side of the conscious, proletarian, ocker aspect of Australian society”, and fights for the film’s “beauty and its
gentleness”.
And
those who dislike the film, too, might have some purchase on this sensibility
when they see the film in a continuum not with Bertolt Brecht but with the brazen, masculine, willfully politically incorrect self-exposure
by a national Australian figure such as Bob Ellis, and respond (as I endeavoured to do) to some of the really nasty, murky,
self-deluding stuff in it. Either way, getting close to the filmic and cultural
sensibility of this (or any) film means attending to it more closely as a film – as an unfolding drama of behaviours and postures, temperatures and emotional effects
– than a lot of recent analytical writing is willing or able to do. This is
Richardson’s point: “Like too many film writers, Berry does not attend
sufficiently to the film as a sensuous object, and thus marches right past the
inflections of meaning that such attention can reveal”. (12)
If
all this seems to conjure a war or a great divide – between those old-fashioned auteurist aesthetes who call for refined responses to
cultural works, and those latter-day saints of contemporary theory who presume
to psychoanalyse and pigeonhole the reactionary
ambivalences of the former sect – then this just indicates all the more
strongly and urgently our need to get beyond thinking and practicing criticism
in these unhelpfully split positions.
1.
Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972), p. 208.
2.
Ibid.
3.
Andrew L. Urban, “Dennis O’Rourke and The
Good Woman of Bangkok”, Cinema Papers,
no. 84 (August 1991). All further statements by the filmmaker are quoted from
this piece.
4.
Pascal Bonitzer, “Les images, Le cinéma, l’audiovisuel”, Cahiers
du cinéma, no. 404 (February 1988).
5.
Quoted in Raymond Durgnat, “Nostalgia: Code and
Anti-Code”, Wide Angle, Vol. 4 No. 4
(1981), p. 78.
6.
I know of (but have not seen) two films that connect this European art cinema
tradition to stories of East-West erotic exchange: Alain Tanner’s La Femme de Rose Hill (1989); and Pierre Rissient’s Cinq et Peau (Five and
the Skin, 1982), about “a Frenchman in Manila ... his movements, his
meetings, his enthusiasms, and his sexual fantasies”, which Tony Rayns describes as “unclassifiable”, “clearly autobiographical”, “exquisitely literary” and “mesmerising” (Time
Out Film Guide). Both films would clearly provide rich material for
comparison with O’Rourke’s. [2018 note: Rissient’s film has now been restored for DVD/Blu-ray
release by Carlotta in France.]
7.
Gérard Gozlan, “In Praise of André Bazin”, in P. Graham & G. Vincendeau (eds), The French
New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: British Film Institute, 2009), p. 103.
8. Bérénice Reynaud, “Representing the Sexual Impasse:
Eric Rohmer’s Les Nuits de la pleine lune”, in S.
Hayward & G. Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 1990).
9.
Chris Berry, A Bit On the Side: East-West
Topographies of Desire (Sydney: EMPress, 1994),
p. 31.
10.
Martha Ansara, “A Down to Earth Festival”, Filmnews (July
1991), p. 6.
11.
Owen Richardson, “A Bit On the Side”, Agenda, no. 38 (September 1994), p.
12.
12.
Ibid.
© Adrian Martin January 1992 / December 1994 |
