First Hit: I don’t know how the director was able to create this film but the result is powerful and sad.
The intimacy of the filming of this film is phenomenal.
There are conversations with the women but mostly the film is observational. We watch how they obtain their customers.
This film is done in three segments: 1) Thailand, 2) India, and 3) Mexico. The venues are different in how the women obtain their customers. In Thailand the venue is The Fishbowl. Here women punch clocks. When they come to work they first do their makeup, get something to eat, and then sit in a glass room with tiered seating conversing with their fellow workers while men look at them through the glass.
The club manager gives recommendations to prospective clients. Once a selection is made, the girl is paid for at the register, and then enters an elevator to go up to an antiseptic room for sex. The girls complain about there being too many women as competition as well as the type of men they don’t like.
In India the women stand outside small rooms in dirty narrow alleyways and cajole their men customers into their rooms for sex. There is a segment where one girl, who seems a bit troubled, breaks down crying because she loses a client to another woman.
In Mexico, the men drive slowly down a potholed dirt road looking at women who stand in front of the doors to their rooms. Men then converse with the ladies, set a price, park and do their thing.
Here we actually see the act (the only time in the film) openly and watch as woman is clearly the alpha force in the room.
Michael Glawogger wrote and directed this film which was amazing in its intimacy and emotional detachment.
Overall: An excellent view of what people say is the “world’s oldest profession.”