Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

(Note: Sample material is taken from uncorrected proofs. Changes may be made prior to publication.)

Good Woman of Bangkok, The
(Australia, O'Rourke, 1991)

The Good Woman of Bangkok is a controversial account of the Australian documentary filmmaker Dennis O'Rourke's nine-month involvement with a Thai prostitute named Yaiwalak Conchanakun, called Aoi. Modeled after Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan, which uses the central figure of a prostitute to examine the possibility of living a good life in a corrupt world, O'Rourke's film explores the conjunctions of sex and money in the East meets West world of Bangkok and examines the ethical complexity of his multiple roles as client, lover and director in relation to Aoi. Although O'Rourke remains an off-camera voice throughout the film, his work is centrally concerned with his intercession into and interrogation of Aoi's life, which culminates in his offer to rescue her from prostitution by buying her and her family a rice farm. O'Rourke provocatively positions his very personal film as "documentary fiction," an antithesis of the objective documentary which rearranges chronology for dramatic effect and self-consciously examines the voyeuristic nature of filmmaking. Although the film centers on the life of Aoi, it indicates the elusive edges of a larger story about the intercultural, interracial and economic complexity of post-colonial capitalism.

The film begins after the collapse of O'Rourke's marriage, when he travels to the notorious Patpong region of Bangkok to explore the nature of love and sexual desire. The 43-year old O'Rourke hires the 25-year old Aoi for her sexual services and begins to film her as she tells a life story full of victimization and exploitation. The film traces the trajectory of Aoi's life: her birth into a poor peasant family, her parenting by an alcoholic father, and her pain from an untreated birth defect that has left her blind in one eye. She spent her adolescence in servitude before making a bad marriage to a man that deserted her when she was two months pregnant. Aoi eventually moved to Bangkok at the urging of her mother and worked in the Patpong area to support her family and pay off their debt. The camera unblinkingly follows Aoi as she plies her trade at night, tells her story during the day, and performs the intimate acts of eating, sleeping, and tending to her dead father's shrine. Aoi eventually moves to the rice farm that O'Rourke has promised to buy her and her family. The Good Women of Bangkok concludes with an epilogue that reveals Aoi's return to the sex trade underworld, from which O'Rourke attempted to rescue her. The reason for her return to Bangkok is never revealed, suggesting that there is much O'Rourke does not know and perhaps cannot know about Aoi, bound as he is by cultural, economic, and sexual lines that frame Aoi as an ever-elusive subject.

Lisa Hinrichsen

The Good Women of Bangkok (Australia, 1991, 82 mins) Produced by Dennis O'Rourke and Glenys Rowe. Directed by Dennis O'Rourke. Cinematography by Dennis O'Rourke. Editing by Tim Litchfield. Filmed in Bangkok.

Further Reading
Berry, Chris. The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O'Rourke's 'The Good Women of Bangkok,' Sydney: Power Institute Press, 1997.

Stones, Rob. 'Social Theory, Documentary Film and Distant Others: Simplicity and Subversion in The Good Women of Bangkok,' European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2003.

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