Thailand. (Vinai Dithajohn/Kino Lorber)

A young Thai woman prays at a Buddhist temple. “Here I can show my faith and express my wishes. I pray hard to become rich and successful.” Austrian director Michael Glawogger’s third in a trilogy of documentaries about labor begins with a selection of female laborers expressing their faith in trying circumstances. Their work is, after all, the oldest profession in the world.

The Fishtank is a Bangkok brothel where women dance in picture-windows overlooking a busy street, aiming laser-pointers at prospective customers. Women are displayed like merchandise behind a glass enclosure that suggests both police lineup and zoo. They are known to johns only by their numbers, and are color coded according to their price range. These colorful scenes, beautifully photographed by master cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler, come off as a nightmare combination of the slave trade and modern consumerism.

Whores’ Glory documents not just the working women, but also the men who make the sex trade such a lucrative and dangerous industry. In each of the countries surveyed, men defend the system. A Thai businessman asserts, “We men are a commodity here,” while other customers lament frigid wives. A Bangladeshi barber claims that without the local brothel district, “women couldn’t go out on the street without being molested.” A middle-aged man prowls a strip-mall of vice, in Reynosa, Mexico. His running monologue dripping with such misogynistic contempt for the flesh peddlers that you wonder how the cameraman can stand it.

Bangladesh. (Kino Lorber)

Glawogger and his small crew worked on Whores’ Glory over four years, much of which time was spent gaining remarkable access to three of the world’s most notorious red light districts, though you may note that none of them is European or American. The director would be loathe to admit it, but his film is as much showmanship as expose. “I don’t make anything beautiful,” Glawogger told the New York Times on the occasion of a mid-career retrospective. But he does, by documenting the packaging of desire, and my making his own aesthetic choices. The sumptuous look of Whores’ Glory, with its atmospheric colors and graceful camera movements by master cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler (no hand-held cinéma vérité here) sometimes works against the harrowing material. A soundtrack peppered with songs by Coco Rosie and PJ Harvey lends the film a seedy romanticism that can make you forget you’re watching a documentary. This threatens to glamorize the sordid lifestyle. But when the music stops, you wish it were only a movie. After a dramatic pause, a teenage girl in a Bangladesh red-light district laments, “It is very hard to survive as a woman. Why do women have to suffer this much? Isn’t there another path for us? Is there a path at all?”

Whores’ Glory is not the first documentary about prostitution to hit Washington this year. Silverdocs brought Meet the Fokkens, which looked at a pair of sixty-something veterans still working Amsterdam’s red-light district. The tone of that film changed dramatically from light-hearted to tragic to some kind of triumphant, but there is no possible redemptive arc here. The women of Whores’ Glory seek the titular salvation in their faith, but this sometimes glorified look at their lives reveals only the darkest nights of the soul.

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Whores’ Glory
Written and directed by Michael Glawogger.
Not rated. Contains scenes of explicit sex and harrowing societal cruelty.