F antasy about Third World women

Films

Ivelyn Hogan looks at some not so deep and leaningful aspects of Dennis O’Rourke’s latest film

”N crisis, at the end of his marriage to his Papua New Guinean wife, Aus tralian filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke ent to Bangkok to “fall in love” and ake a film.

[After establishing his fame making

me of the most sensitive and insightful krumentary films of the Pacific, especi y in Papua New Guinea, O’Rourke is Kv in the process of making a new film:

\e Good 11 Oman of Bangkok.

Money from the Australian Film

jmmission’s Documentary Fellowship

heme allowed O’Rourke to make the ti on any subject he chose. He chose “a lie in the process of being freed of his image .

He spent nine months in Bangkok ning hours of footage in a hotel room th a Thai prostitute, Oai. Every three mths he returned to Canberra to spend ew weeks with his children.

In Canberra, early in the 1980 s, the <G community knew the marriage was making up. There were rumours of cord in the family. O’Rourke and his e were rarely seen out together. On ■ rare occasion when he joined the nmunity for dinner he left early, ring other important commitments, never lingered, PNG style, reluctant end a night out. n an interview for the magazine emu Papers August 1991; O’Rourke :ussed his motivations for making the i. He said he would not have worked naking documentary films for 15 years it had not been a very high form of indeed” with a “possibility of creating lething of very great value ...”, but he ests the way filmmakers rather than subjects become the heroes of the nmit ted documentary and “are al ed by their sense of their goodness and :th le says his inspiration for the film ics from Brecht s play: The Good Person i zechwan. This play about a prostitute n ironic parable about the impossibil of being good in an evil world. It is the Papua New Guinean play, The d 11 ornan of honedabo. This is also ut a prostitute caught up in the evil Vestern capitalism. )’Rourke chose Thailand rather than igs Cross to seek out a prostitute to fall ove with. He says this w ? as because of incredible fantasies Western men e about Asian women. He wanted the is-line of culture with jet planes ling and going: “It had to be first Id. third world, of brown and white, i and poor”.

The making of this film brings together the deep contradictions of O’Rourke’s life and work. He seems capable of such sensitive work and such an insensitive life. He became one of many thousands of Australian men on sex-tours of Asia

exploiting, cannibal tours. Intellectually

he sees the fantasy, yet he enters into it.

Each film is only a fleeting moment of his life; he always moves on. He says: “I don’t live anywhere but in the present and a film becomes a tombstone of a particular period ... It’s pathetic in a way, and an impoverished way of covering your whole life”.

In the film, Oai talks in the most intimate way, pouring out for hours exactly what she is thinking. After her Thai was translated, O’Rourke found out what she thought of him: “You are the sky and I am the ground.

I am just rotten garbage. You pulled me out of the rubbish heap only because you want to make this film. I think every thing you do and say to me is to manipulate me for your film. My friends tell me that, even if you have promised to buy me a rice farm, it’s not a big thing.

Compared to your film it’s not much. I’m sure you’ll get much more from your film, but I think it’s alright. You’re doing me a favour. I can help you too.”

O’Rourke bought Oai a rice farm before he left Thailand. He was disap pointed to return several months later to find her working in a place “even worse than before”. Several years earlier, when he broke up his marriage with his wife,

he told her she should return to her Papuan village “to rediscover herself’.

The alternative he envisages for women of the Third World is not to enter more fully into an equal place with men in the modern world. They are to return to a half-life in the mythical past of subsistence farming and the digging stick.

For O’Rourke, now far from the dairy farm in Queensland where he grew up, the place of women is bound up in the myth of the countryside. Men are active.

Their conquest of women is like their conquest of the earth. But in the Third World, as in the First, women do not want to be limited by the male expec tation of their role. D.H. Lawrence expresses this well in his novel, The Rainbow.

“It was enough for the men, that the earth heaved and opened its furrows to them ... But the women wanted another form of life than this, something that was not blood-intimacy. She stood to see the far-off world of cities and government and the active scope of men ... She faced outwards to where men moved dominant and creative, having turned their back on the pulsing heat of creation.”

The film will be completed within a year. It will be acclaimed as a most sensitive and original work. O’Rourke will be a hero; the film maker who gave a Thai prostitute a means of expression and a rice farm. But Oai will continue in the bars of Bangkok. His Papua New Guinean ex-wife will continue in Can berra, a single mother bringing up three children alone.

He will jet off to the film festivals of Europe. He will not have fallen in love.

He will have no long-term commitment to another Third World woman he has caught up in his life and work. Both have been plavthings of cow-cockie fantasy. □