Kritiken

Make no mistake: any beauty Glawogger’s film boasts is ironic, as the director observes his subjects with both a genuine fascination and a distanced respect—and all the time without sentiment.

A non-judgmental, eye-level representation of prostitution that gives a voice to those practicing the oldest profession. This is no standard talking heads doc, although that stylistic choice is both used and transcended. Rather, the late, great Glawogger (gone too soon at the age of 55 from malaria) presents the work and the workers as a triptych, globe-hopping across the world to three red light districts with a thriving market.

[The film] is a critique that almost seems at times to be an homage. In trying to tear away certain illusions held by people living in the developed world... Glawogger practically ends up making icons of his subjects: they are the wretched of the Earth. And it is their general indifference to the filmmaker in their midst that truly authenticates this status. So destroyed are these workingmen by the extremity of their daily grind that they can't... modulate their performances for the camera.

You have to love a film that deliberately pisses on 'documentary ethics' and plays PJ Harvey over footage of women actually selling their bodies in real time. Glawogger's cool view of reality is such that he views everything as if it were the stuff of great cinema. The lingering impression is that if the world didn't tie itself into such abysmal knots then it wouldn't so easily become worth filming.

Why watch something so awful the director didn't even have the guts to film directly? The most obvious reason is that Whores' Glory is, if not great, at least very good, attuned to the specifics of its three different locations and the many different types of misery and misogyny in the world.

"Whores' Glory," is as sad a film as you can possibly see. To experience it is to be haunted by the bleakness and ugliness of prostitution, the hopeless trap of it, and the defeat of love that it represents.

If there's an ideological point (and a smidgen of hopefulness) to be found in "Whores' Glory," it lies in the film's insistence that the women Glawogger meets in Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico remain defiantly individual, even in the face of a system of sexual and economic exploitation they cannot (or at least do not) resist. Indeed, "Whores' Glory" has a surprising double focus on the women's economic lives and on their spiritual and religious pursuits.

[A] quietly powerful but dispiriting documentary... unlike many contemporary films on the subject, “Whores’ Glory” is not an outraged exposé of human trafficking... [but] takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward flesh peddling, wherever it occurs.

Subtlety may not be Glawogger's strong point (see: a dog-mounting-dog scene; the use of PJ Harvey's "Snake"), but his treatise on the female body reduced to a commodity wallops its points across with stunning, sickening effectiveness. A young woman begs to know if "there['s] another path for us…is there a path at all?

Despite its grim subject matter, Whores’ Glory features a killer soundtrack, stylized editing for each segment, and a bluntness in its depiction of the subject that’s neither demoralizing nor judgmental. Glawogger’s latest slice of global miserableness may not be eyeopening, but it’s honest.

Whores' Glory is vital not because of its human-interest stories, but because of the things it tells us about the transfer of resources from one party to another, how we sell ourselves and buy the same from others, even if we're not doing so in a physical sense. Like the director's best work, it's an acute portrait the shifting status of traditional markets in an ever-changing world.

Making his directorial hand felt in his aesthetic choices (why, one wonders, is PJ Harvey playing over shots of destitute Bangladeshi hookers?) and his decision to directly interview both the prostitutes and their clients, Glawogger alternates uncomfortable observation with questionable shows of auteurist presence. It's not always an easy mix, but the director generally manages to capture enough richness of detail to justify the project's more problematic moments.