Tag: brothel

Love Sonia

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Inseparable rural Indian sisters Sonia (Mrunal Thakur) and Preeti (Riya Sisodiya) work the land with their father Shiva (Adil Hussain). He wishes that his daughters were boys because he thinks that males have greater strength and stamina. Seeing Preeti as not pulling her weight, Shiva sells her to local businessman Baldev Singh (Anupam Kher) for employment in Mumbai. Horrified at her beloved sister’s disappearance, Sonia sneaks off to the local businessman and offers to work in Mumbai so she can be close to her sister.

Singh’s trusted associate Anjali (Sai Tamhankar) takes Sonia across the country by bus. Sonia’s enthralment at Mumbai’s bustling metropolis soon gives way to horror as she discovers what her work entails: she’s locked in a brothel with no obvious way out. Worse still, her sister is nowhere to be seen.

Thrown in with the more experienced and cynical Rashmi (Freida Pinto), Sonia is manipulated by brothel manager Faizal (Manoj Bajpayee) who talks with her as if he had her and all the other girls’ best interests at heart but elsewhere is shown on his mobile touting her as an innocent village virgin.

For its final 20 minutes, the narrative goes international with Sonia and Rashmi transported by computer-trackable shipping container to first Hong Kong where her hymen is resealed by Chinese medics, then L.A. where she services a wealthy client (Mark Duplass).

The opening countryside sequences impress, not only for showing very effectively the two young girls’ carefree, sisterly innocence and the very sweet boy from school who wants to be Sonia’s boyfriend and hold her hand but also for its quite chilling sexist undercurrents. Girls are perceived to be less physically able, so they’re less valued. Simple as that. And as the film progresses, at least until it leaves India, this feeling that women are worth less than men permeates everything.

Even Anjali, the woman who pretends to be kindly and helpful even as she’s transporting Sonia towards brothel incarceration in Mumbai, is trapped by a system that favours men over women. A survivor who’s taken matters into her own hands and doing alright out of it, Anjali has been reduced to betraying her fellow women.

Staying overnight in a hotel en route to Mumbai with Anjali, Sonia is warned by the hotel owner (Ankur Vikal), who clearly has more respect for women than do most of his fellow countrymen, to get away from that poisonous woman. And in Sonia’s brief escape attempt from the Mumbai brothel – before being caught and returned to Faizal’s establishment by the (male) police – a small boy (Sunny Pawar) on a market stall cheerfully describes her as a “Bang-Bang” with crude, expressive hand gestures to match.

The most harrowing scene is Sonia’s accompanied entry into the brothel – the locking of a grille at the entrance after she’s gone inside, the walks down lengthy corridors, the brief glimpses of thrusting male buttocks atop prostrate female bodies revealing exactly the sort of work into which Priiti has been sold. Thereafter, however, the focus is on the psychological manipulation of Sonia by her captors and while this is conveyed very well, you can’t help but feel the film makers have gone out of their way to keep further sexually explicit content to a minimum after this sole, highly effective, almost no holds barred scene.

On the one hand, that may not only allow the film to be watched by viewers who might otherwise find it too harrowing but also spare the actors and actors from portraying acts of a sexual nature which perhaps they shouldn’t be asked to perform. On the other, it perhaps overly sanitises Sonia’s experience, reducing her trauma’s potential power. That said, a couple of sex scenes involve Sonia, including a pretty unpleasant rape, albeit fairly discretely filmed.

Seeming brothel client Manish (Rajkummar Rao) tells Sonia he works for a charity that rescues girls tricked into prostitution. His later attempt to rescue her fails when she won’t come out, possibly because of Stockholm Syndrome, and the police quickly usher him off the premises with the one girl he’s already rescued. This incident makes her captors move Sonia to Hong Kong so she can’t be traced. Hollywood’s Demi Moore later turns up as an anti-sex trafficking charity worker in L.A.

The exposé of enforced prostitution and international sex trafficking, a form of slavery, is to be welcomed, as is the timely portray of widespread Indian male prejudice against women. For this writer, though, Love Sonia would have been more effective still had it not tried to tone down its physical, sexual content. But it’s still worth seeing.

The UK premiere of Love Sonia is on January 23rd at Curzon Bloomsbury – book here.

Love Sonia is out in the UK on Friday, January 25th. Watch the film trailer below:

You Were Never Really Here

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Dazzling. Kaleidoscopic. Violent. Psycho. Taxi Driver. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s latest film is at once a rare piece of virtuoso cinema playing with the possibilities of the form and a dark journey into a Hellish American underbelly. The images are the cinematograph’s answer to great paintings courtesy of production designer Tim Grimes and director of photography Thomas Townend: the music is an unforgettable, sometimes pounding score by Jonny Greenwood interspersed with classic songs like If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked You A Cake, in this context all the more unsettling for their homeliness.

Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is completely out there. One could say he dominates the movie, but actually Ramsay’s images and sounds dominate it just as much as Phoenix does. He has a much bigger role here than he does playing Jesus in Mary Magdalene, out next week. It seems almost disingenuous that of the two roles, You Were Never Really Here is the one that should tower above the medium. Maybe that’s the problem with portraying good and evil: it’s much easier to make evil stand out. Not that Phoenix’s character here is entirely bad: his antihero possesses a certain moral ambiguity.

Joe (Phoenix) is a mercenary employed by rich fathers of disappeared teenage girls to track them down and rescue them from captivity – meaning enforced sex work in houses used by paedophile rings. Joe’s modus operandi is to work out how many people including guards or security are inside, then take a hammer and bludgeon them to death as he encounters them one by one in order to safely remove his client’s daughter and return her to her father.

But this is no linear plot. The narrative is fractured so that, for example, events seen at the start turn up again later on. Were you watching a flashback? A flashforward? These games are constantly played with the audience, so much so that the piece may actually play differently to you if you go back and watch it again. There are moments cutting from the adult Joe to glimpses of him experiencing trauma as a child, for example breathing with a polythene bag over his head. Who is Joe? What happened to him in the past to make him the way he is now? We are given hints but told nothing specific and expected to draw our own conclusions. A multiplicity of interpretations, perhaps?

He constantly looks in on the home of his ageing mother (Judith Roberts) to check she’s okay. When he first visits, she’s been watching a TV rerun of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and it’s scared her. As in, she’s enjoyed watching a really scary movie. She takes a shower. She’s as independent and strong-willed as he is – and Joe is torn between being frustrated by the fact and being a devoted son. He mimics knife-slashing outside her bathroom door while she showers inside.

The other major female character is Senator’s young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), drugged to her eyeballs when Joe rescues her from a paedophiles’ brothel. A young girl with no idea of what’s going on or being done to her. Very different from the seemingly savvy underage child prostitute played by Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and apparently at the opposite end of things from Joe’s own mother – young, healthy and adrift rather than old, frail and anchored. And yet, these archetypes are undermined in the course of the film: mother has become the victim and Nina has been rescued.

Finally, who is Joe? In the closing minutes, he performs an extreme act of violent self-harm right before our eyes. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it’s in his imagination. Or perhaps it isn’t and the narrative’s happy ending is in his imagination.

Cut to somewhere in the middle of the film. Joe has delivered hammer blows to the head of two suited thugs. One of them, who has admitted that he wasn’t the murderer on this occasion, lies dying on the floor. Joe lies down beside him and allows the dying man to hold his hand. A moment of tenderness in the aftermath of violence.

The film constantly shifts the audience’s allegiances like this. Sometimes we warm to Joe. At other times, he’s our worst nightmare. He doesn’t say a lot. The strong script is generally sparse on dialogue, preferring to provide the wherewithal for the film to weave its magic/wreak its havoc in sounds, images, performances, editing and music. As such, it’s a highly visceral experience almost unimaginable in a medium other than cinema. It’s also indubitably dirty in its subject matter, in its manipulation of the cinematic medium and in its dealings with the audience. Even down to its enigmatic title, taken from the book from which it was adapted. If you were never really here, then that begs the question, where were you really? Should you have been here or should you have been somewhere else? Or did you really imagine the whole thing?

You Were Never Really Here was out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 9th. It’s available for digital streaming on Monday, July 2nd.

The Receptionist

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is both a Taiwanese production and a London one in terms of writer-director, cast and locations. The Receptionist is inspired by real life events that happened to someone director Jenny Lu knew. Fictionalised here as Anna (Shuang Teng, also one of the producers, whose performance is quite simply heartbreaking), that character has come to the UK seeking work to send money back to her debt-ridden family and turns up alone and out of her depth at a newly opened, suburban London, so-called massage parlour where a “body to body” is £60 a time. It’s run by hard-boiled Chinese Madam Lily (an astonishing turn by seasoned actress and singer Sophie Gopsill) whose briefly seen English landlady (Nicola Wright) has no idea Lily is anything other than an ordinary tenant.

When the dowdy Anna turns up trolley suitcase in town, Lily already has three women working there – Mei (the very watchable Amanda Fan) and Sasa (a multilayered performance from Tsai Ming-liang regular Chen Shiang-chyi) service the clients while Tina (Teresa Daley whose honest, matter-of-fact performance carries the film) works as receptionist. Mei is a happy-go-lucky type from Malaysia who seems to like dressing up, but don’t let the surface of her character fool you: this film is an honest attempt to portray the lives of sex workers in the UK, how they get into that line of employment and what keeps them there. The older Sasa is a single parent mum working to support her child.

Although the character of Anna was the script’s inspiration, story construction is built primarily around receptionist Tina from whose perspective we are shown the lives of these characters as they ply their trade within the confines of a small, anonymous London terrace.

Literature graduate Tina is living with her white English boyfriend Frank (Josh Whitehouse from Northern Soul, Elaine Constantine, 2014) and both of them are struggling to get work. There are just too many applicants chasing each job whether for architectural assistants (him) or anything in the book trade (her). Tina goes to an interview for a receptionist job and initially walks away when she discovers it’s a receptionist post for a brothel. But then, she needs the money. And the job pays. So she goes back and takes it. Just for a few days. At first.

One of the great strengths of the film particularly in its more focused first half, while purporting to document the plight of East Asian ethnic minorities in the UK (which it does admirably), is that it manages in passing to succinctly express the situation in which Generation Rent currently finds itself – lumbered with student loans to service, unable to find a job, lacking sufficient money to buy a home – which suggests that its audience may be far, far wider than the East Asian demographic at which it seems at first glance to be aimed. Those tensions are never far away and go some way to explain why these women have fallen into the sex industry.

The occupants of the house must interact with their mostly English-speaking clients, so scenes between the women are in Mandarin while others are in English. We watch them cooking, relaxing and working with clients. Both director and actresses appear as fluent in English as in the other languages, giving a real sense of a an immigrant community within the wider, English-speaking London. The clients are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant, the latter giving rise to some fairly harrowing scenes. Towards the end, perhaps in an attempt at narrative closure, there’s the inevitable police raid.

This first feature gets an awful lot right and makes some important comments about Britain today and the way it (mis)treats both outsiders and its very own younger generation. It’s perhaps noteworthy that it’s taken an outsider to make this film in Britain: nevertheless it’s bang on target and deserves to be shown to a wider, mainstream UK audience.

The Receptionist played London East Asian Film Festival in 2017, when this piece was originally written. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 20th.