I love Malle's documentary style--perfected in his "Calcutta"--where there is minimal narration and he lets the images speak for themselves. And many of these images are enthralling...it's good to see Bangkok when it was not so spoiled as it is now. The narration did yield a statistic that I found a bit startling, for some reason: that, at the time, Bangkok was 2nd most expensive city in the world, after Washington.