Falang: Behind the Bangkok Smile (Bangkok Girl) (2005)
Written and Directed by Jordan Clark
After the first few minutes of the film, I realized this was not your typical Michael Moore-style big-budget documentary on global macro-world issues. However, Clark, with the low-budget quality of his, gives us a film that is free-flowing and spontaneous with scenes often missing from many high-profile documentaries. The filmmaker gets close to the subject of the film, perhaps too close. He blurs the line in objective observance as he delves into the seedy underworld of Bangkok. The film deals with the comparatively rarely recognized problem of Bangkok’s “sex tourism” industry. Prostitution is a driving part of the city’s economy, but it is also the cause of crime and the exploitation of Bangkok’s young women. Clark arrives like many other westerners on vacation, but he is armed with a camera and intent on capturing a story. It is almost by accident that Clark meets Pla.
Pla captivates Clark. Her innocence and her smile draw us in when we see Bangkok through her eyes. Clark seems almost embarrassed to present Pla as a “bar girl” where the girls are hired to work in the bar serving drinks and as waitresses, but are also expected to be escorts for the customers who are usually foreign westerners looking for girls for sex calls “Falang”.
But Pla is a bar girl and we learn more and more about her life, which seems to serve as a mirror to the many other “bar girls” that inhabit the city. She is poor, lonely and beautiful. She has a survival instinct that keeps her in the bar girl business, but she dreams of escaping that life by moving abroad to live a different life. We start dreaming about her, hoping that maybe she’ll find a way.
Pla’s story propels the film forward, interrupted occasionally by Clake’s comment about Bangkok’s “sex tourism” which the film does a good job of exposing in covert style. Many of the people who run the “bars” are Western expats and foreigners who bring in money to start the clubs where the girls work. The “Falangs” are also the source of money for these clubs to prosper. The local government, which maintains that prostitution is illegal, often accepts scraps and bribes to stay out of the way. Women have few protection rights and are not even allowed to charge for their services. All the money they receive comes in the form of gifts and “tips.” Many of the women seem to have no choice but to work in the clubs to earn enough money just to survive. Pla explains to Clark that she has to work at the clubs to buy medicine for her mother and soon after she disappears for a few days, so Clark assumes that she is with a “client”. Clark doesn’t do much to hide his affection for Pla, which defies professional ethics in filmmaking with him, but gives us a truly personal piece not seen in many documentaries. Many of the scenes are awkward, tendentious and amateurish, but he manages to show his heart.
I’ve read a lot of controversy about the ending of the movie that I won’t reveal here, but the movie leaves you wondering about all the women who live and work in that world, and if anything can be done to help them.