Title:Sex: The Annabel Chong Story By: Gough Lewis Released by: Omni International Released on: Rating (out of 10): 6 Date: 05/16/2002
Annabel Chong
Gough Lewis' Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
Feminist, college student, sexual being, porn queen—all are words that could be used to accurately describe Grace Quek AKA Annabel Chong. And yet, while watching Gough Lewis’ documentary, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, we see that she’s more than the sum of these parts—we learn that she’s a daughter, a rape victim, a reformed drug addict, and a fair intellectual as well. In short, she’s more than the sexual object her industry has made her and countless other women out to be, but she’s also more than what society itself deems her to be as well…and this fact is the documentary’s one saving grace.
Annabel/Grace is a young Singaporian female who was raised in London. She came to America to attend USC, and in response to some ardent feminist ideals, wound up working in the porn industry. She became famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) after making a video in which she had sex with 251 men in a ten hour period. Gough Lewis uses this gang-bang video as sort of a framing device for his own film—following Annabel around and chronicling her rise to fame, her decision to leave the industry, the industry itself, and Annabel’s relationship with her mother.
The problem is, Lewis takes what could have been a fascinating look at one of porn’s most intriguing performers and instead turns it into your standard tale of a woman who uses the act of stripping/making pornography to compensate for an emptiness inside her. To be fair, this might be the real Annabel Chong—a woman who parades around saying that she’s a feminist with an agenda and claims to be unafraid of what others think of what she does, yet hides her career from her own parents and family. At the very least, Annabel is a dichotomy—a being with two distinctly different sides to her—one part nympho goddess, the other dutiful daughter. At times, she’s capable of stunning insight into human nature and sociology and at others she’s a barely coherent whirl of babbling nonsense…and the effect is unsettling.
To highlight this, Gough shows us Annabel’s appearance on The Jerry Springer Show—an appearance where she not only is nearly incoherent, but also appears quite strung out as well. He then contrasts that with shots of Annabel in a class at USC—making some eloquent and persuasive arguments about sexuality and media. It’s interesting to watch, but much like the porn industry itself, it’s all surface. Gough never manages to dig beneath the veneer and show us what makes Annabel tick. Here he has a subject who might be one of the few fully self-actualized women working in the industry and he never manages to explore her with any depth—leaving the audience feeling empty and unfulfilled.
For example, take Annabel’s rape. She admits that she had consensual sex with a guy in a stairwell, and that she then had sex with his friend—who in turn brought more friends. She says she feared for her life, but that she continued having sex in the hopes that she might survive. There’s got to be some kind of correlation between this and the aforementioned gang-bang—and I’m sure that Annabel is smart enough to make the correlation—but Lewis never asks her to. Ultimately, it’s a missed opportunity, and Lewis chooses to go on and explore other areas of Annabel’s life—but they’re trite and predictable and illuminate nothing. Particularly bothersome is amount of time he devotes to an AIDS test—it’s a manipulative sequence that reeks more of fictionalized filmmaking than an actual documentary.
But, that’s not the only place where Lewis drops the ball. He hints at the tension between Chong and fellow porn star Jasmine St. Clare (who broke Chong’s record) but we never get any details on how Annabel really feels. Lewis treats us to a disturbing sequence where Chong makes slashes on her arms with a knife (because she needs to let out her pain, she explains) but he never asks the question we all want to hear the answer to: what fills her with pain? Equally bothersome is that Chong never got paid for her work in the gang-bang video—and she’s never pursued it legally, claiming that the act itself was worth more than money. It’s a fabricated answer, yet Lewis never presses her for more—and we’re once again left wondering what the real reasons are.
By almost all accounts, Annabel is a porn rarity—a woman who actually enjoys the sex. If you’ve ever seen any of her work, this becomes readily apparent…she’s not an actress who simply lies there and groans—which Lewis manages to show us on numerous occasions. She’s quite the nymph and seems genuinely devoted to turning the male satyr myth on its ear through her work.
The film does have its humorous moments though—generally at the expense of the porn industry itself. Actor Michael J. Coxx complains (with a straight face, no less) that Chong’s gang-bang video is giving porn a bad name. Director John T. Bone tells Lewis how Annabel has ended up in dire straits because she’s surrounded herself with leeches—all of whom are out to bleed her dry. Of course, he neglects to mention that he owes her $10,000 for the video.
And while Lewis never explores anything with the depth it needs in order to be truly insightful, he does do a nice job of capturing Chong herself. We see every facet of Grace/Annabel—from her appearance on the set to some less than flattering shots of her extremely crooked teeth. Lewis manages to show us the good and the bad—making the film seem like more than just an out and out fluff piece.
Ultimately, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is just as confounding as its subject. It isn’t a pleasant viewing experience yet it manages to entertain on occasion. It’s an almost schizophrenic film—vacillating between being an expose, a character study, a farcical comedy, and more…something that leaves the viewer disoriented at the film’s conclusion. If it succeeds at all, it does disprove my original notion—that Annabel Chong was one of the few self-actualized females working in the porn industry, a woman who was not only comfortable with what she is doing, but also with who she is. I do think she’s comfortable with the sex itself, but I’m not entirely convinced that she’s comfortable with who she is—a fact witnessed by one of her final lines in the film. At any rate, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is interesting enough to recommend to people who are interested in the porn industry, its stars, or Annabel Chong in particular—just don’t expect any to get any profound insight out of it.
