Mark Jenkins. A man eyes some of the women working at the upscale Fish Tank brothel in Bangkok. The documentary Whores' Glory chronicles the experiences of sex workers in relatively clean establishments β and some living in de facto slavery.
The world's oldest profession is one of cinema's oldest subjects, sometimes employed for pathos or political metaphor, but often glamorized. But neither does it qualify as an expose. The movie, which shifts from Thailand to Bangladesh to Mexico, aspires to a cinema-verite style. Yet it's unusually well-lighted and -composed for on-the-fly footage, and includes scenes that appear to be staged.
The film is also weirdly aestheticized. The opening sequence, in which Bangkok hookers gyrate in a picture window and use laser pointers to attract customers, is set to a trip-hop tune by cult star Tricky. This prologue yields to some verse β by Emily Dickinson, of all people β and these words: "a triptych.
That doesn't just mean that the movie is divided into three parts; the term is also a reference to tri-panel European devotional paintings. Religion is one of the themes of the film, which interrogates the influence of local beliefs. In Thailand, working girls pray to a Buddha who is both benevolent and pragmatic.
In Bangladesh, Islam doesn't prevent prostitution, but it does supposedly rule out fellatio. And in Mexico, the movie finds crack-smoking sex workers who worship a skull-headed Virgin Mary and wish devoutly for "a good death. The director and his crew shot at the film's various locations for only about 10 days each.
