The hookers aren’t happy in “Whores’ Glory.’’ Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger takes his cameras to three red-light districts around the world, and finds life is miserable for the women who work in the world’s oldest profession — and for the men who pay cash for sex.
In Bangkok, the hookers punch in on a time clock before going into glass booths to wait for johns to choose them for what a pimp calls an “all-inclusive session.’’ In Faridpur, Bangladesh — the most depressing of the three places visited by Glawogger — the prostitutes, many still in their teens, work in a rundown brothel and vie (sometimes violently) for customers. When she’s asked for oral sex, one woman says, she tells customers that “Allah didn’t make my mouth for that purpose.’’
And in the area known as the Zone in the Mexican border town of Reynosa, the women — many long past their prime — wait in the doorways of small rooms in a rundown motel. The director hitches a ride with a local who handicaps the hookers as he drives through the area. “I love these women,’’ he says. “They sure know how to move.’’
Glawogger doesn’t make any moral judgments, but you can’t help but feel sorry for the “girls’’ and their johns. For comic relief, Glawogger throws in a scene in which dogs copulate on the street in front of a brothel.