Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Sex: My British Job, review
The harsh realities of real-life crime in Britain today was the focus of veteran director Nick Broomfield's distressing film Sex: My British Job (Channel 4). An exploration of how illegal immigrants are drawn into prostitution, it featured a brave Taiwanese reporter, Hsiao-Hung Pai, who placed herself in considerable danger by filming undercover in one of the estimated 2,000 illegal brothels operating in London alone. As Broomfield put it: "We set out to make a film that would do more than reveal the inside of a brothel. We wanted to show, over time, the process by which women get drawn into this world."
They certainly succeeded in that. Having secured a job as a housemaid in a north London brothel by posing as an illegal immigrant desperate for cash, Pai found herself utterly exploited – working 18-hour days, seven days a week for negligible money, bullied ceaselessly and put under relentless psychological pressure to engage in sex work herself by the Chinese madam and the other working girls. Neither slave nor prisoner, she was free to leave at any time, but it was easy to see how someone alone and in desperate need of money could find themselves trapped in such a situation.
The emotional price Pai paid was visible in every frame she recorded via her Austin Powers-style spy spectacles – not least the fear of discovery by her employers. She also, over the weeks, found it increasingly impossible to distance herself from the view of her fellow workers, whose illegal status left them few other options, that the life and its dangers made a perverse kind of sense – that they were suffering for the sake of their impoverished families back home.
In the end Pai could take no more and had to get Broomfield rescue her. This film offered no solutions. Indeed its closing scenes, in which the pair confronted the madam and her thuggish Romanian boyfriend on camera, got nothing but threats in response. But the vulnerability of illegal immigrants drawn in to such work in this country was well captured on camera. Surely this must inspire someone in authority to make more of an effort to tackle such intolerable abuse?
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/319e7714/sc/38/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0C10A3291780CSex0EMy0EBritish0EJob0Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
