Growing up in rural Thailand Aaw (Suangporn Jaturaphut) is marked out as different from the other children, who taunt and abuse her.
It's more than the fact that she is Khmer rather than Thai: Her family know how to use magic, a secret her grandmother reveals to Aaw when, one day, something tries to drag her under as she swims in the river.
This magic is powerful but has its own set of prohibitions that Aaw must not break: First, she can never walk under a clothesline. Second, she must not take payment from others for using her magic. Last, she must never eat raw meat.
Fast forward a few years and Aaw's grandmother has fallen ill. (Clearly their magic doesn't offer anything here.) Needing money to pay for medicine and to support the old woman, Aaw takes up the local store owner's suggestion of a job in Bangkok, where the money is good.
Needless to say, the job turns out to be in a hostess bar…
Renamed Dau by the madam, Aaw soon loses her virginity to one of the bar's owners, a European, and is helped to overcome the trauma by one of the other girls, the kind-hearted Pookie (Opal), whom she moves in with.
As the owner then mocks Aaw and moves to deflower the next naive young arrival Aaw/Dau remembers and calls upon her magic, summoning a snake which bites the man as he siphons his own python.
As the months pass, Dau grows accustomed to her new life and home and seeks to secure an easier and more rewarding job as a pole dancer, practicing her routine in secret to avoid the attentions of the current incumbent, May (Narisara Sairatanee). Eventually, Dau requests an audition before the madam, but embarrassingly falls flat on her face. Discovering that May had greased the pole, she calls upon her magic once more to extract a grisly revenge.
Power going to her head, those three taboos are quickly forgotten. Not a good idea…
On paper it does sounds like a good idea: Merge hard-hitting prostitution expose with horror to bring your issue to a wider audience than your typical well-meaning but dull documentary.
Alas, however well-intentioned it might be, the result emerges as an oil and water combination suffering from what we might call the Showgirls and Carrie syndromes: Like Verhoeven's film the dynamics of exploitation and critique feel confused. Are we supposed be turned on or turned off by what we see? You assume the latter, but if so why the somewhat leering emphasis? Like De Palma's film, how are we supposed to react to a protagonist who moves from sympathetic victim to out-and-out monster faster than you can say "monstrous feminine"?
In the end, despite good performances and a clear command of technique on the part of writer-director-editor-whathaveyou Paul Spurrier, just what is the point of something that's too grim and depressing to be fun but too stylised and sanitised to be taken terribly seriously?
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
Rating:
5.0 / 5
(2 votes)
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