Rating: NNN
annabel chong is the nom du porn of Grace Quek. She achieved a bizarre kind of fame in 1995 when she starred in The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, wherein she was filmed having sex with 251 men over a period of 10 hours. It’s a record that would soon be broken, but there it is.It turns out that Chong is an unusually bright young woman working toward her degree at USC and developing ideas about sexuality and its presentation in our culture, which makes her an appropriate subject for a feature-length documentary that doesn’t document her having sex with a bunch of guys.
The film reveals her to be the sort of emotionally damaged woman who often winds up in porn. She self-mutilates and has an intensely troubled relationship with her Singapore family and their values. As she tries to figure out who she is, her accent shifts around. Depending on whom she’s talking to, she can go from English English (she was educated in London) to Valley Girl drawl to a flat, almost accentless English that makes her sound as if she’d learned English as a second language.
There’s some brief interview footage with school friends and porn-world associates, some non-explicit footage from the infamous event and long scenes in which Quek natters on in front of the camera.
Director Gough Lewis and his crew had extended access to their subject, including a visit to her family in Singapore that climaxes in a long, emotional confrontation with Mom, who’s just found out what her daughter’s been doing in America, and a visit to London, where we discover that Quek was gang-raped.
Lewis is basically a hands-off director who cuts himself out of the film as much as possible. But I do wish that he’d asked certain questions and left them in even if Quek was non-responsive, like, “Was performing with 251 guys in a movie an attempt to exorcise the memories of the rape?” (I suspect it was.) If the filmmaker is intimate enough with Quek to film her cutting her own arm “to let the pain out,” he’s close enough to ask the big question.
Porn-star documentaries are becoming a weird little subgenre. There’s The Girl Next Door (1999), tracing the ups and downs of Stacy Valentine’s relationships with her boyfriend and plastic surgeon. An episode of Frontline on PBS profiled Shauna Grant (Colleen Applegate). Most memorable, though probably least seen, Kamikaze Hearts (1986) climaxes with a documentary filmmaker’s version of the money shot: Sharon Mitchell and Chelsea Manchester, porn stars and lovers, get together and shoot up on camera.
Porn stars do make an almost ideal documentary subject. They are exhibitionists by trade, offer an array of “hot” issues simply by the fact of their existence, and the innate sensationalism of the material allows “serious” filmmakers to indulge their inner Jerry Springer. Lewis even includes footage of Chong’s appearance on The Jerry Springer Show.
Yet the filmmakers’ apparent neutrality seems designed to serve as a kind of moral finger-pointing. The directors of these films seem to be looking at the women who perform in porn to show us how generally miserable they are, even when they put on a brave face.
The PBS special on Shauna Grant, who committed suicide a year or so after leaving porn, kept trying to blame porn for the sad ending to her life, even though it described Grant’s pre-porn teenage suicide attempts.
Lewis at least has the decency to indicate that working in porn is rather like taking drugs — it doesn’t give you anything you don’t already have. johnh@nowtoronto.com
SEX: THE ANNABEL CHONG STORY directed by Gough Lewis, produced by Lewis, Hugh Currie and David Whitten, with Annabel Chong, John T. Bone and Allen Wong. 87 minutes. A Coffee House Films Production. Opens Friday (December 13). For venues and times, see First-Run Movies, page 85. Rating: NNN
