Reviews

There are real evils in this world to be exposed, including genuine sex slavery and pedophilia rings. Those films take courage to make.

Here, these filmmakers' self-professed "expose" of brothel run by an illegal alien and staffed by illegal aliens is hardly what it claims to be. While the madame is boorish, she is hardly exploitive. At no time did she abuse, punish or confine any of the working girls. In fact, all the girls were working of their own volition to make more money than they could as in some other capacity without immigration papers. None were "enslaved" at the brothel.

The real story here is how the filmmakers take a non-story and attempt to spin it as an expose of something sordid, which it is not.

A few points:

* The undercover "reporter" Hsiao-Hung Pai is excessively dramatic claiming that she was terribly abused by the madame while working as a maid and cook at the brothel. It may have actually been that the madame was legitimately not satisfied with her work, or that Hsiao-Hung was genuinely annoying (she comes off a bit dense as she baits people to talk more into her spy glasses). After all, instead of doing the job she was hired to do, she is more focused on filming the brothel under false pretenses, worrying about recharging her spy glasses or coming up with excuses to run out and pick up another pair of spy glasses, angling for as much "chatting" time with the madame in order to get some juicy tidbits, or hiding in the bathroom. Can you blame the madame who hired her for being annoyed?

So the madame said some not very nice things to the maid ... that doesn't constitute exploitation or a crime or sex trafficking. There is one scene, intended I suppose to be dramatic, where the madame asked the undercover reporter to give her a head massage, and God Almighty, her hair was greasy. What sadistic abuse she endured! At the end of the film, Hsiao-Hung feels "compelled" to confront the madame ... for what? To tell her that she was mean to her? Get real.

* The subtitles of the Chinese spoken by the madame were deceptive. It shows her repeatedly calling people "c*nt", but that is simply not the case. In one instance, what the madame said was "you are weird" in Chinese , and it was translated as "you c*nt". That is not only wrong to mislead the audience in such a way, it is UNETHICAL.

* Hsiao-Hung makes a big stink about how all the guilt talk about "the need for an immigrant to make more money for ones family" was getting to her, and she verges on an emotional breakdown. Is this a documentary about sex trafficking (no), sex exploitation (nope), sex slavery (not) or the filmmaker's own emotional problems? Probably the latter. In the end, what is most grating is the emotive, self-indulgent, over- dramatizations of the filmmakers' own emotional issues. This really is all too typical of BAD documentary filmmaking, when the filmmaker has nothing interesting to observe, so they have to observe (and overplay) their own emotional reactions to what was going on. BORING and BAD filmmaking.

Moreover, the madame (and all the other working girls) are really just minding their own business, trying to make money for their families. The filmmakers, on the other hand, intrude on their lives duplicitously, ruin their livelihood, and then confront the madame to condemn her in an shrilling and overbearing manner, literally cornering the madame so that she had to call her boyfriend to escape. So who commits the only crime with a victim in this film (assault and false imprisonment?). And who here really comes off as the more sympathetic in the end? In my view, not as the filmmakers probably imagine.

The only potentially controversial issue is the fact that the madame encouraged the girls to not use condoms, but this was not forced either and occurred more out of naivete.

Look, I have no problem with documentary filmmaking on mundane topics. The filmmaker could have taken this film a different direction, making a sympathetic portrayal of the struggle of illegal immigrants etc. But instead, they chose to portray the situation as "exploitation" and they themselves as "investigative journalists", when it wasn't and they definitely were not. The only exploitation being committed in this film was by the filmmakers. If they really had courage, they would be exposing real sex crimes, but they didn't. If they had real sympathy, they wouldn't have crassly exposed all the women in the film the way they did (and it is still a mystery why some girls faces were obscured but most weren't ... favoritism? vengeance? who knows?) and manipulated the story in unethical ways. This film is a cheap and deceptive cop out.

Vengeance of Mine was my first exposure to Shohei Imamura, a tautly amazing movie full of dark humor, fearful violence, sexual tension and deep questions about life (note: this movie, among any other, absolutely deserves to be released on DVD). Dr. Akagi explores many of the same themes from the angle of a more dignified and admirable protagonist, a widower physician in a small fishing village whose life work is to tend to the many locals who are falling ill with hepatitis, a disease whose pathology and means of transmission are not yet understood. It also presents an interesting view of wartime Japan in a village removed from the immediate devastation of the war, how life goes on as it typically does but with the war slowly intruding more and more into the people's daily lives until it literally explodes above their heads. The director's great talent, in my opinion, is how he never judges his subjects, whether because the person is a whore, a morphine addict, an embezzler, a dissolute drunkard or pervert. He depicts them as they are. The characters and situations depicted in this movie seem to me very authentic representations of the Japanese character, in its multiplicity, and that's part of what makes it a delight to watch. Dr. Akagi is the most intriguing one of all the characters, as he goes through not one but two personal transformations in the movie that are so subtle at first that you fail to notice them until the movie comes together neatly at the end yet leaves the question, what motivates us to do the things that we do in life, what's our purpose in life and what keeps us alive. Of course, the answer is never clear, and the movie does not shy from that reality. The cinematography is also very nice, especially the scenes with the whale at the end which are simply beautiful and imbued with mythos in a scene in which director wonderfully transforms the village whore and daughter of a fisherman into the mythical woman that reawakens Dr. Akagi to his life. Beautifully done. Only complaint: the jazz soundtrack is a bit overly intrusive and excessive. That should have been toned down a bit, but otherwise, a very moving and poignant film.

I was expecting a lot out of this movie, especially after seeing the very intelligent and interesting interview on Charlie Rose with the screenplay writer. But the result was a movie full of what cannot otherwise be described as clichés (and a few rather unnecessary story lines). So big oil is bad. Big oil, naturally, is represented by a Texan good old boy. Backroom deals with the government prevent the full disclosure of malfeasance in the domestic oil industry from being exposed because to do so would undermine our strategic national interests. The CIA betrays one of its own to cover up an undercover mission gone awry. The US backs a "business-as-usual" emir over his reformist brother with lethal consequences. Then there's a bunch of unemployed Pakistani migrant laborer youths recruited to become suicide bombers. Although it should be a shocking expose, somehow it isn't. Perhaps I've seen too much Frontline on PBS to be the target audience for this movie, which I suspect to be more of the Farhenheit 911 variety, but I can't help but to feel that there's a straw man being propped up here. The straw man (and the boogeyman) in the movie is the image of American (and big oil's) omnipotency and omnicompetency in its dealings in the region. From watching recent events unfold, I can't help but to think that that image does not reflect reality. The reality is more like America, while big, powerful and wealthy, is wildly flailing about in an unfamiliar neighborhood while getting stung on all sides by agile and cunning foes. I mean, do we really know what Iran is up to? Do we know what Saudi Arabia is up to? Do we know what Pakistan is up to? Do we really know what's going on in Iraq? Each has strategic ambitions in the region, and I think it naive to assume that they foolish enough to merely continue to spend their profits on "$20,000 per night hotel rooms" and other luxuries rather than reinvesting into their productive infrastructure and ultimately degenerate in a 100 years' time to "chopping each others heads off in the desert", as the movie's most memorable line states. I suspect the situation is more complex, with everyone trying to make each other dance to their own music. America (and big oil) just has the loudest band right now. And so if you see the situation from that perspective, I think the movie distorts the actual complexity of the situation by reducing the issue to being more black and white than it actually may be.