Here is the first post by our newest diaCRITIC, Michelle Ton. Michelle is a graduate student of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Over a month ago, Viet Thanh Nguyen blogged his impressions and experience about the joint UCLA/AMPAS event New Voices from Vietnam. He finished the entry with a postscript reassuring that his was only the first take on the films, and that diaCRITICS hoped to acquire reports from others who saw the movies. Dear reader, that time has finally come. A month late, no less. Clearly, expedition and the concept of deadlines are beyond my purview. Having said that, let’s get down (and back) to business…
November 5th – November 14th, 2010
In the offerings at the “New Voices from Vietnam” series, programmers and organizers Michael DiGregorio, Shannon Kelly, and Ellen Harrington packed 15 films into two weekends at the UCLA Hammer Museum—Billy Wilder Theater, the series headquarters. In attendance were the new wave of Vietnamese filmmakers presenting their work—Phan Dang Di, Thien Do, Nguyen Quang Binh, Phan Xine (a pseudonym meaning, “Cinema Fan”, I kid you not), Le Thanh Son— and actor and actresses Dustin Nguyen & Do Thi Hai Yen (both from Floating Lives) along with the legendary Kieu Chinh mingling among them (who is now my new best friend and calls me every 5 minutes. Hi KC!). As a Vietnamese-American, it’s an exciting and curious experience to see your fellow Vietnamese on the silver screen who a) do not get “Oliver STONED” (just watch that bastardizing film Heaven and Earth to get my neologism), b) are not administering a game of Russian Roulette with Bobby De Niro and the like, and c) are not playing the marginally good-looking AZN chicks in Lindsay Lohan’s teen comedy, Mean Girls. Are these seriously the only examples I can extemporaneously conjure up for seeing Vietnamese/Vietnamese Americans in the pictures? How pathetic of this author. As such, the New Voices from Vietnam series tempers this reality with films from Vietnam by Vietnamese/Vietnamese-American filmmakers and starring Vietnamese actors.
The entire program featured something for everyone. A little art house (Bi, Don’t Be Afraid & Adrift), a little action (Clash), a little drama (Floating Lives & Moon at the Bottom of the Well), a little romance (Owl and the Sparrow), a little real world (documentary shorts). Phan Dang Di’s first feature kicked off the event with Bi, Don’t Be Afraid. It’s slow. It’s “artsy”. It’s Contemporary Contemplative Cinema, folks. In writing about this film, I can’t help but recall Harry Tuttle’s film blog Unspoken Cinema—a site dedicated to CCC and the ilk of deeply masterful international auteurs who inhabit this realm and style of filmmaking.[1] For Tuttle, he aptly identifies the criteria for CCC as the following:
“PLOTLESSNESS : no obvious (forefront) drama, no beginning, no denouement, open-ending, no drive to go forward, no major narrative gimmicks (flashback, multilayered stories), simplicity, atmospherical depiction, distanciation of protagonist(s) with background action, no imminent threat, no external forces pressuring the protagonist(s).
WORDLESSNESS : laconical interactions (or silent protagonist), no plot-drive expository filling, no psychological arguments, no voiceover, direct-sound (no score), body language.
SLOWNESS : long takes, static shots/slow camerawork, patient pace, uneventfulness (down time), “unnecessary” mundanity, uncut movements, activities filmed in their entirety, extended wait/pauses, conscience of time.
ALIENATION : disconnectedness, wandering/idleness/listlessness, solitude, fatalism, ennui/melancholy/depression, non-conformity, no intellectualized existentialism, distanciation of protagonist(s) with the world, with other characters, emptiness, empty frames, distanciation of the camera from the subject.”
Tran Anh Hung was the first Vietnamese filmmaker to join this bandwagon, and Bi, Don’t Be Afraid sure enough fits within these prevailing paradigms of CCC. With its oblique narrative, about a family living in modern day Hanoi whose emotionally dolorous lives are further complicated by the return of a terminally ill grandfather, we learn once again… minimalism can be kind of hard, man. A generous reading of Bi would be to say its sexual candor and gravitas are dispatched through an artful gentle passing of time (Lord help me), but the execution, such as it is, comprise overused motifs (water and leaves; leaves being somewhat meaningless for the film as Phan himself admits during the Q+A held after the screening) and an overdeveloped sense of ennui. However, the aestheticism and texture of contemporary life and living in Hanoi is something to behold in all its evocation of vitality and redolence that is skillfully captured by the film’s D.P., Pham Quang Minh. Phan Tranh Minh, who plays the titular role of 6-year-old Bi, is a gem of a child actor and a brilliant casting choice made by Phan. But overall, it feels to me like it plays a bit too deliberately as Moody, Reductive Art Film Concerning Desire and Disconnection. Too much like standard festival fare.
A highlight of the series was the first installment of the documentary film program that featured contemporary life in Vietnam shot within an observational mode of filming. Though docs today that insist on illuminating the issues of generational gaps between familial bonds are, shall I say, a truism-cum-platitude at this point, Mother and Daughter and Grandfather and Grandson are surprisingly engaging and endearing pieces. M&D showcases your archetypical disagreements between a teenage girl and her loving but (in the daughter’s eyes) overbearing, conservative mother. They don’t see eye-to-eye on clothes, hair, music, and certainly not the daughter’s cineaste aspirations. Despite their constant quibbles and the daughter’s onscreen frustrations and airing her grievances about living under her mother’s roof, the mother is captured and filmed in a very sympathetic light. We see her as a heroic, loving, and dutiful creature who raises her three children solely, and spends her days accomplishing the mundane but the necessary tasks from selecting live roosters at the market to bring home for dinner, to mending their torn jeans and repairing plumbing fixtures. With G&G, we see a bucolic way of life in provincial Vietnam. The documentary centers on a teenage Luddite who harvests, hoes, and slogs knee-deep in mud on his grandfather’s farm. It is an intimate, picaresque inquiry into Vietnamese life as lived by the country’s provident youth and how one teen balances generations of familial farming duties and his need for a consumptive lifestyle in the city. A memorable moment in G&G that I must recount: while tending to his tasks and explaining his daily work routines to the camera, a rooftop suddenly catches fire amidst the background. The boy turns his head and surveys the scene for a few brief moments, then turns back to the camera and nonchalantly continues his story. “Oh, just let it burn. It’ll stop when there’s nothing left.”
Thanh Cong Ward provides outsiders a look into one of Vietnam’s governmental interventions in a Hanoi neighborhood. In a Big Brother-esque fashion, the Thanh Cong Ward boasts loudspeakers that disseminate various mundane civic information and orders to the masses from mandated “volunteer cleaning” to announcing regulations about pet vaccinations. The inhabitants of this ward are pained by the speakers’ amped decibels in such close, cramp quarters and voice their concerns, but alas, the local leaders in the neighborhood contend “if we listened to people complain, we’d never get our jobs done. It’s the decision of the committee we’re carrying out.”
I’m compelled to find an alternative to the prosaic label “hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold” when thinking about Nguyen Quang Binh’s Floating Lives (2010). Tart with a heart? At any rate, the film, adapted from novelist Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s The Immense Rice Field, portrays the life of a nomadic father and his two children and yes, a hooker with a heart of gold who serendipitously enters their lives after being chased down by the angry wives of the johns she’s engaged with (and then ends up staying with them on their boat for months). The film was shot on location and comprises postcard views of the Mekong Delta that features Dustin Nguyen as Vo, the chiseled jaw, handsome but (at first) loathsome and unsympathetic single father, along with Do Thi Hai Yen as Suong, the kindly woman of misfortune who unsurprisingly becomes a love interest for Nguyen’s character. The picture glows all pearly and languid where most of the movie is sun coated and sugar cured. Dustin Nguyen shows his flair for melodrama in handling the emotional entanglement between father and daughter towards the film’s end. He’s sadistic and shark like, but his meanness is tonic for the narrative’s purpose. From a gruff, broken man drunk with bitterness, he transforms into a gallant, responsible father capable of sorrow and who’s essentially decent and untwisted. All in all though, the film bops along in a mildly romantic and mildly engaging way.
To “want the moon at the bottom of the well” is actually an Italian expression to describe yearning for the impossible. When reflected in a well, the moon appears reachable, but frustratingly remains far and intangible. In Vinh Son Nguyen’s 2008 feature, The Moon at the Bottom of the Well, the impossible appears to be a traditional nuclear family for Hanh, the film’s subservient protagonist. Moon is a bizarre melodrama. A Cliff Notes summary: Hanh is a school teacher living in Hue. Her husband, Phuong, is the school’s headmaster. Hanh is barren, so they remedy this reality by allowing Phuong to have second wife, a surrogate, who will bear the children that Hanh cannot conceive. The parties involve are equanimous by this arrangement while the townspeople are scandalized by this unconventional “modern” family. Once Phuong decides to move in with his baby’s mama after she gives birth to his second child, Hanh is distraught and turns to mysticism to help her cope with her husband who is now in absentia. This is the point in the movie where things get weird. Her spiritual adviser conjures up a new mate from the heavens for Hanh and sure enough, he “appears” late one night and a new matrimonial union is joyously formed—much to the dismay of Phuong when he finds out that Hanh is gallivanting around with a non-entity and causing an even bigger scandal now in the town. Though Ozu-ian inspired in style and pace, Moon is an uneven film in its attempt to comment on societal conventions and mores within Vietnam’s contemporary climate. Though I’m stingy in my praise, what I found remarkable about the film was its impeccable sound engineering. According to Vinh Son Nguyen during the Q+A, The Moon at the Bottom of the Well is the second feature, after Living in Fear (2005), to have sync sound. Wow, who knew?
Midway through the series, the event shifted venues from the Hammer Museum to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to salute Vietnamese director and veteran of Vietnam’s film industry, Dang Nhat Minh. Minh was born in 1938 in the city of Hue and is renowned for films set amidst the backdrop of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of the Vietnamese. The evening’s feature presentation was Minh’s 2000 film, The Guava House, and in attendance were fellow cineastes Stephane Gauger, Le Thanh Son, Phan Dang Di and Nguyen Vinh Son who all participated in a roundtable discussion with host Phil Alden Robinson, the Academy’s Vice President and Governor. Minh made a thank you speech later on in the evening confessing he was surprised to have been selected for the great honor and never dreamed that it would happen. Furthermore, he didn’t see it as an honor solely for him, but for the entire film industry in Vietnam. A few other revelatory highlights from his speech:
*He developed his identity as filmmaker in an industry that had only produced 10-15 features a year.
*In the 1970s when he began making movies, the only film studio and distributor was the government, who provided funding to serve the national cause. As such, movies were not considered entertainment in the country.
*Now in 2010, much has changed considerably since the renovation towards a market economy. The government funds only one feature a year now. A private film industry has been established where 70% of films are now privately funded and distribution is 100% privately funded.
*Minh rarely watches his own films as he tends to only see the shortcomings in them. He doesn’t sees himself as an innovator of cinematic style—merely an honest storyteller. His sole concern is to tell the stories of his people.
The final film to cap off “New Voices from Vietnam” was Stephane Gauger’s The Owl and The Sparrow (2007). It is a Cassavetes-style, Shirley Temple-esque movie about three lonely, disparate characters in modern day Ho Chi Minh City. What happens when you take a zoo keeper, a flight attendant, and a meddling 10-year-old runaway and mix them together? A saccharine induced movie just looking to pull at your heartstrings and appeal to the feel-good indie crowd. It’s charming, yeah. It’s sweet, yeah. It’s sentimental, yeah, but it truly remains a modest, predictable venture for this cinephile’s tastes and sensibilities. Cat Ly is still a stunning and convincing performer, however, and the captured sights and sounds of HCMC is a feast for the senses.
[1] Just to name a few for the sake of naming a few, reverence goes to the usual suspects of CCC: Tsai-Ming Liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Carlos Reygadas, Lisondro Alonso, Apichapong Weerasethakul (but, please, just call him Joe).
Michelle Ton is a graduate student of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA and is a first- time contributor to diaCRITICS. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
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