Love on Delivery 2008

Thai women and Danish men offer each other something less easily found at home, in a pair of intimate documentaries that sympathetically explore marriages in which emotional comfort is frankly bartered for economic security. The first, Love on Delivery, takes us to Thy, on the northern tip of Denmark. Fifteen years ago, Sommai, the town's first Thai, arrived to join the man she'd met in a bar in Pattaya, the well-known beach resort near Bangkok. Now this cheerful pragmatic woman oversees a thriving marriage market and more than 500 Thai women have made a home here with their Danish husbands. While observing four client couples, the film focuses most intently on Sommai's lovely and wary niece, Kae, and her unlucky-in-love suitor Kjeld. Perfect strangers, sharing no common language, they must decide whether to marry in the three months before Kae's tourist visa expires. She is instructed by Sommai and her girl crew, often to amusing effect, in the finer points of Danish domesticity, while Kjeld, Thai/Danish dictionary in hand, embarks on his own voyage of discovery. — SR