I Thought He Had Cancer

This was one of the most impactful scenes to me in the movie that truly shows how this system works. Not only are these women being used by the Madame and the whole system but these women are made to believe that they have to take on the burden of sending tons of money to their families.  Joy was made out to believe that she had to send tons of money for her Father’s cancer treatment but upon Madame’s return from Nigeria, she learns that her father is healthy and her brother has a new shiny car.  Joy is being used by her family so that they can live comfortably in Nigeria while she has to do all the work and be used in order to scrape by with all that she owes every week.  In Joy’s case if her family was in fact lying to her, she could of taken the man’s money to live with him and gotten out of this situation sooner.  This aspect plays into why it is so hard to break out of the system.  Joy is sending all of her extra money to her family, who claims they are in such need of it, when in reality they have luxurious things that Joy does not have herself, which causes her to not have money stored away for when she is finally free. This causes the women in her situation to be more attracted to becoming a madame themselves because it’s a business that they know and can make a lot of money doing.

 

Moment of Realization and Understanding

This film did a good job of emphasizing; without glamorizing, the real life moment in everyone’s lives where one is faced head on with a reality that they cannot change or easily change without a lot of work that one necessarily does not want to do for a multitude of reasons. In this case the work was prostitution and extortion for a better life in the end far away from their homeland. The fact that they know what they are coming to Austria and other countries in Europe and choose this path because of how bad it is where they are originally from also magnifies this scenario. The film and the expressions on the actors face really did a good job capturing that emotion and moment of realization that in order to get out of this situation,  they must also accept it as reality for now and bear the weight of the struggle until the goal is reached. In this shot, the mirror and the reflection shows us; vaguely, the other side of the conversation and how serious her delivery is. This effect gives the viewer a more well rounded insight to the scene and the feelings the director is trying to convey.

A Betrayal of Trust Invokes a Further Betrayal

In this scene we see Joy negotiating the terms of her asylum if she were to turn information about her madame over to the government. This scene ties in really well with the theme of a harmful binary, which holds vulnerability inferior and opposite to agency, which can be found in “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” by Judith Butler. Joy is put in a position where she is extremely vulnerable, and even though the problems she is facing are not unfamiliar to the woman working with her to gain asylum, and especially familiar to Joy’s madame, they still have no problem labeling Joy as ‘vulnerable’ and exploiting her for their own personal gain. Both the government and the madames might try and justify their actions by saying that they provide these prostitutes with protection, but at the end of the day they are more concerned with their own personal gain and consider the safety of the people they’re working with to be secondary. By putting the idea of the prostitutes being vulnerable into the forefront of their minds, people who seek to exploit these girls justify the actions by which the girls are made vulnerable. By advertising security, like the blonde woman does in this scene with the posters in the background saying it’s safe to speak out for prostitutes, and then denying any certainty of getting help after putting oneself at risk, these prostitutes are made vulnerable through betrayal after betrayal of trust, which is use to justify further betrayal and greater oppression down the line.