Michael Glawogger’s documentaries have long demonstrated his fascination with the dark and gritty. The Austrian filmmaker has focused on the struggles of the impoverished who are forced to eke out a living, first examining how the indigent survive in the world’s largest cities (Megacities, 1998), before moving on to the study of the poorest, most desperate of manual labourers (Workingman’s Death, 2005). Completing this trilogy with Whores’ Glory, Glawogger opts for even greater circumstantial misery, and documents the practice of prostitution in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico.
Almost immediately, one is struck by the dissonance between the subject matter and the score. Glawogger shows us brothels and scantily dressed women in filthy, overcrowded landscapes. Songs by Cocorosie and PJ Harvey accompany these bleak urban scenes, brusquely snapping the viewer out of a reverie of instinctive sympathy and revulsive disbelief, and into an amalgam of film noir grittiness mixed with the painfully strained sentimentality of a poor script. The audience is repeatedly reminded of this inconsistency throughout the Bangladeshi and Thai portions of the film, as if a sales tag were slapped onto the gravity of the situation. The portrayal of torment and anguish is not made any more poignant with the addition of a clever soundtrack, and the movie ends up hobbled by the score’s cheap Hollywood sentimentality.
Much of Whores’ Glory also suffers from a lack of continuity. Throughout the filming in Bangladesh and Thailand, one has a palpable sense of being presented with a catalogue of life’s difficulties, disguised as art for art’s sake. Although there is some merit to depicting the events as they appeared—without any auxiliary judgment on the filmmaker’s part—I expect that Glawogger, who gave four years to this movie, would have received some insights worthy of sharing in return. Had he employed them to guide the audience’s understanding, much of the film would have felt far more cohesive.
The final part of the documentary, shot in Mexico, somehow avoids these pitfalls. The score almost wholly disappears, with the music provided by a mariachi band that plays outside the large, low building housing the sex workers’ rooms. In addition, Glawogger limits the number of women he speaks to, examining their lives in more depth. This alone makes Glawogger’s project worthwhile.
The great strength of Whores’ Glory, however, lies in the filming. At a recent Q&A, Glawogger explained that he spent many months in brothels in order to gain the trust of both the prostitutes and their regular “Johns.” Indeed, the film captures his subjects at a remarkable proximity. We not only see the array of human flesh through a panoramic pane of glass in an upmarket Bangkok brothel, where the customers make their selections, but we are also taken behind the glass, to hear the girls absentmindedly gossip as they wait for customers. In Bangladesh, the camera descends into the dizzying maze of prostitutes’ rooms, each one competing with the others for their daily keep; forcibly pulling their customers into their rooms, berated by their madam, and collapsing from exhaustion, all while under the weight of human poverty.
Glawogger gives us a wretched, pitiful sight to see. Be prepared.
