Jordan Clark is a creep! He spends 41-minutes making us fall in with a sweet-natured Thai bar girl with a hardscrabble life and then informs us in the film's closing moments that she is dead. It is a blunt, unceremonious finale to a film dripping with misery and pain. Not exactly the Friday night party-starter I was hoping for.Bangkok Girl is less a hard-hitting documentary about Thailand's sex trade than it is a love letter to its doomed 19-year-old subject, Pla. There is nothing sketchy about Clark's love for Pla. He is genuinely interested in her story, as well as her safety. His camera never leaves Pla as she shows him around her hometown, introduces him to her co-workers at the German-owned bar where she is employed, and discusses her traumatic childhood. He cares for her and as the film progresses, we start to care for her too. We don't want anything to happen to Pla and we're confident that Clark will keep her from harm. He does. As long as he and his camera are around.
The scenes without Pla--and they are very rare--largely fall flat. Who doesn't know that Bangkok is a cesspool of horny falangs, crooked cops, and miserable poor people by now? You hear about someone vacationing in Thailand and you automatically go, "Yep, he's a pervert." It is a sick, dangerous, and corrupt city, but the women seem to be the only ones who suffer, so, unfortunately, nothing much ever changes.
The scenes without Pla--and they are very rare--largely fall flat. Who doesn't know that Bangkok is a cesspool of horny falangs, crooked cops, and miserable poor people by now? You hear about someone vacationing in Thailand and you automatically go, "Yep, he's a pervert." It is a sick, dangerous, and corrupt city, but the women seem to be the only ones who suffer, so, unfortunately, nothing much ever changes.I don't know what Clark could've done to save Pla's life. Probably nothing. I'm sure her death haunts him to this day. Doesn't mean I want to be dragged into his nightmare. I so wanted Bangkok Girl to end with photographs from Jordan and Pla's wedding or a "1 year later" update that saw Pla working in a center for former teen prostitutes. But I guess happy endings aren't for everyone. Some people just die. But why did it have to be Pla?
GEP says: SKIP IT!
