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[Oct. 16th, 2009|04:35 am] |
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| | and as we say our long goodbyes / i nearly do | ] |
I just finished watching Sex: The Annabel Chong Story.
It's a slightly bizarre pastiche of scenes from her life - her trips around the world, up-close interviews in her L.A. home, commentaries by porn directors, her family home in Singapore, footage from the original porn film.
( slightly nsfw stills )
I still don't quite know what to make of it, though. The documentary itself is unremarkable, with minor subtitling and no narration. It is a little disjointed, with choppy cuts and abrupt scene changes, adding to the general feeling of unfinished business traveling hastily from one world to the next. The flow of the film follows little linear progression except, in a very oblique way, her journey in telling her mother what she did for a living.
What to me is unsettling is Annabel Chong herself. I got the feeling that what I saw wasn't all there was to Grace Quek.
You see this woman with a strange, almost-all-American accent; then you see a director describing her to have "an English accent and an Asian look"; then this same face is on the phone with Mr Barnard in a painfully measured British accent; then you see her having dimsum with her mother and speaking Chinese, then she speaks with a straight-laced Singaporean accent; then it's back to L.A. song. With so many facets to her character, surely you'd wonder whether there were some others that you weren't seeing?
She says that The World's Greatest Gang Bang was her means of expression, her way of questioning the role of the female as a passive, objectified sexual participant. Why can't I be a female stud, she challenged, but the first thing that comes to my mind is: is this really what you are looking for? I mean, I'd be the first to stand up for challenging the norm and pushing the envelope, but under such circumstances, was her 'artistic intent' sort of a post-script, an afterthought that said, now that I've done this, how can I justify it? And sure, she might have done a jujitsu on gender norms and turned them on their heads, but isn't opening yourself up to five men at a go objectifying yourself? How is this in any way different from allowing the men to go around shagging girls like the studs they are? After all it was only 70 men, repeating the sex acts so it came up to 251 times. And let's not forget the porn industry either - who is using who? Is Annabel Chong utilizing the great institutions of San Fernando Valley to achieve her aims, or is she just allowing herself to be used by the ruthless, mercenary porn industry?
It did make me ask myself a lot of questions, though, and perhaps therein lies the documentary's ingenuity.
One of the most endearing scenes (perhaps only because it comes after scenes and scenes of mindless fucking and nonchalant, brash nudity) was when she sat down at a roadside dimsum joint and passed her mother a pair of chopsticks. This was followed quite immediately by a cutaway scene of mother and daughter, united in tears, sitting on the floor of the family home and packing clothes into luggage suitcases while crying about 'regaining dignity' and 'shameful dishonor'. Sure as hell this is jarring, and heartbreaking. It makes me wonder, though, what this mother's pain is truly about - is it about her face? or her failure as a parent? or concern about her daughter's spiritual and physical well-being? It is so painful to watch because it is only too easy to put yourself in Annabel Chong's position, whether you are coming out, or telling your parents you've dropped out of law school, or that you've been caught taking drugs. If you had known how painfully this would have turned out, would you still have 'fessed up to this someone who has invested so much time, money and love into you? And then you put yourself in her mother's position and wonder, what would you do in this situation? Would you still be able to love your daughter, the girl whom you raised to be a God-fearing child but whom ended up spreading her legs for 251 strangers? Surely this daughter who just took you out for dimsum is still the daughter who just took you out for dimsum, no different in any way except in your eyes?
I respect and admire Annabel Chong for her free spirit and unrelenting willingness to break new ground. That said, this film has made me realize that perhaps there are different ways to go about this, and there are many more 'objectively' better means to express your ideas. Sure she loves sex and so decided to tell the world what she thought through porn, but what if life had made her a successful career woman working in a 'prim and proper' banking corporation?
Or, maybe that's just my "primitive, conservative Singaporean mind" speaking. |
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