Mail Order Wife

I've seen a handful of movies dealing with the mail-order bride phenomenom, like Birthday Girl and Two Brothers and a Bride. But the best of the bunch is the one I saw today, Mail Order Wife.

The film starts off predictably enough, with a graceless sclub bringing over a mail-order bride from Burma. The guy's a doorman in New York, so the cost of this is beyond his means. Enter a documentary filmmaker eager to film the story of an average guy and his mail-order wife. Some money exchanges hands; the filmmaker gets his access.

When the bride arrives, there is a quick civil marriage, some scenes at home -- this is how you clean the toilet, this is how I'd like you to make chili -- and then a trip to the doctor's office, where the husband tries to get his wife to agree to having her tubes tied. Did I say the bride doesn't speak English? She doesn't, and she only learns her reason for being in the doctor's office when her interpreter explains the procedure.

By this point, we're about fifteen minutes into the mock-umentary, and you're thinking: Oh, god, this is creepy. And it's bad, because it's creepy in all the ways you expected it to be creepy. But when the mail-order bride runs away from her husband -- well, the film really takes off, and by the end no one's a victim and everyone's a loser. Or, as the LA Times put it in its review:

Mail Order Wife sends up everyone in its circuitous path — self-deluded lonely slobs, self-deluded documentary filmmakers ... gold-digging Geisha-girls and that specialized subset of muddle-headed manhood that confuses sexual exploitation with humanitarian concern.

...

If the nuggets of P.C. piety and social pretension skewered by "Mail Order Wife" were any meatier, the movie would be a shish kebab.

Get it. Just like any bad relationship, it's the type of thing that gains a whole new meaning when you watch it a second time around. And don't forget to sample the extra scenes available on the DVD. They're priceless. As is the surprise guest star, who was under house arrest when this film was shot and could only leave for the purposes of work.

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2 Brothers and a Bride

I finally saw 2 Brothers and a Bride, originally called A Foreign Affair. The film is about the mail-order bride industry and stars David Arquette and Tim Blake Nelson. In it, Arquette and Nelson play two overalls-wearing rubes, farmers by profession, who go looking for a bride in Russia (on a romance tour provided by the company A Foreign Affair) when their mother doesn't wake up one morning to fix them French toast. Mom's death leaves the men at a complete loss. Dirty clothes pile up, dishes too, and food can only be found if it's scaped out of the bottom of a jar.

The first plot point comes when Nelson, who played a great slack-jawed dope in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, sees a newspaper advertisement for A Foreign Affair, and then goes to the library to ask the librarian (the secretary from the 80s TV show Moonlighting) how to use the internet. When the librarian learns what website he wants to visit -- loveme.com -- she warns him, "I'll be watching you."

From there, the brothers go to St. Petersburg, where Nelson is all business on their two-week romance tour, calling the women by their number and interviewing them to see who fits his order: homebody willing to cook and clean for two years in exchange for a green card. Arquette, the shier, more sensitive younger brother, has more of a Russian vacation, moving from the polar opposite of where he began . "What if she wants to kiss or something," he asked, when his brother first suggested they spend $7,000 on the romance tour. "Don't worry," Nelson answers. "I'll be right there with you. We'll tell her that's not what we want."

I certainly never came across a guy like this, who went to Ukraine looking only for domestic help. Though I was told about one man who married a woman and then reduced her to that. He was impotent, from what I gathered, and wanted someone to look after him. The woman had left Ukraine looking for a better life, and so she might give a better one to her son with her absence. He was then ready to marry, and the mother left her apartment for him. I should dig up my notes and give a little more information on that.

Anyways, I was glad to see the movie, if only because I got to hear the approach of a Russian metro again, see some great, beautiful footage of St. Petersburg in the winter (the movie was shot on location) and even hear "Gorka! Gorka!" -- the command for the bride and groom to kiss at a Russian wedding.

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If the Swedes ruled the world ...

I forget the title, and I'll probably mess up the plot, but there is a movie in Russia, a very famous movie I was told about more than once, that tells the story of a man who gets so drunk the night before his wedding that he winds up in another city without even realizing it. Did his friends put him on a plane? I can't remember. But he has a key to his apartment, and when he sees his complex -- for they all looked the same in the Soviet Union, the same set of plans used between Vladivostok and Minsk -- he enters and goes up to his door on the whatever floor it is. Then he puts the key in, and lo and behold, it works, and inside -- no difference too, the furniture and the layout is all the same.

I was reminded of this when I walked into IKEA's Burbank store yesterday, just a few miles from my apartment in North Hollywood. I saw people of every color browsing the display rooms, heard a handful of languages and even the accented English of young men from France and Italy. Everyone imagined their future with the same Mikael table and the same Stefan chairs, the same Aspelund bed frame and the same designer lamps.

There were cars wrapped around the street out front, the cars inching forward to move into parking-lot where they could pick up their boxed furniture and hurry home to an evening with an L-wrench.

Usually, I see American culture as the homogenizing force in the world, or enter certain parts of Los Angeles and I feel as I have entered a different country, one of the future, where Spanish is the lingua franca and tortillas are sold in bulk. But going to IKEA, I get to imagine how the world might look if the people of Scandinavia, my spiritual ancestors, ruled the world.

Would it be so bad? Sweden and Norway give you maternity leave, and the trains are clean and quick. The air smells good, the grass is greener than any greeen you've seen. Are there Norwegian football hooligans? Have the Swedes invaded another country in the last two- or three-hundred years? No, this would be a good world, with plenty of naked wood. Yes, IKEA's furniture is now so widespread, you can walk into another person's home and feel you've mistakenly entered your own. But this isn't so bad; it just makes me wonder how Communism in Russia might have fared if it had been led not by V.I. Lenin but by V.I. Leninsen. A Commissar of Design? Yes, that's what we would have had, and isn't that why the Berlin Wall fell? People wanted color, they wanted smooth lines, they said enough with these circles, give me square plates. And they didn't care if the expensive was cheap and not built to last. Just give us the impression of comfort and wealth; this is all we want. Revolution in a pedestrain shopping-and-dining setting.

sketch lifted from this website, where other humorous Ikea-themed drawings can be found

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Heading South (and west)

While watching BBC World a few weeks back, I caught an interview with Charlotte Rampling that touched on the dynamics of the "mail-order bride" industry, however obliquely. Rampling stars in the French movie Vers la Sud (Heading South), which tells the story of three women who visit Haiti and use their first-world money to acquire third-world dates. In other words, they're sex tourists. The women wouldn't explicitly pay for sex, but they'd go to bars and pay for their dates' drinks and dinners, they'd buy gifts, and they'd maybe leave some money hanging around on the counter. When asked about this, Rampling called this relationship "a coming together of needs ... quite pleasant for both (parties) often." Tom Brook, her balding and almost eagerly British interviewer, just nodded along when he heard this, not challenging it with a word. But while I listened, I thought, "My god, a man couldn't dare say such a thing about going to Ukraine." Maybe it's because Rampling has such a lovely English accent and everything from her sounds so dignified. Be a dear, would you, and find me a hooker for the evening. That's a good man, James.

 

Anyways, I found my notes for the above while packing up my suitcase and getting ready to leave for Kharkov -- and then Kiev -- and then Munich -- and then Washington D.C. -- and then San Francisco. The first leg of my journey, a two-hour ride from Belgorod, begins in the morning. Then I spend the day in Kharkov (long enough to get all the pictures I forgot to take) and continue down to Kiev on the express train the following morning. My journey home, by air, begins the next day. So, come Monday, I'll be experiencing the culture shock of my return to the United States. Look for a few reports on it here, along with some more posts commenting on the last of my research -- there's still much I have to say (I've had so little computer time). 

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