Jade Hidle: A Review of Le Thanh Son’s Clash (Bẫy Rồng)

diaCRITIC Jade Hidle takes a second look at Le Thanh Son’s action film, Clash, and raises questions of the Vietnamese woman in protagonist Phoenix/Trinh and the embeddedness of Vietnamese film production in the transnational.

Catch Clash at the Vietnamese International Film Festival, 7:30pm on April 14th at UCLA, or at a theater near you.

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If you’re looking for a conventional East-meets-West style of action film, then Clash, written and directed by Le Thanh Son, is a movie that will get you amped for the slew of popcorn summer flicks soon to hit theaters. Met with much success in Viet Nam last year and screened at film festivals in the States, Clash was reviewed by diaCRITICS guest blogger Lee Ngo after just such a film fest last month, but I want to offer my take on the movie as it will be screened on Thursday, April 14th, at UCLA as part of this year’s Vietnamese International Film Festival.

Clash Movie Poster courtesy of vietfilmer.com.

Set entirely in Viet Nam, Clash opens on an open country road where a full- throttle action sequence explodes with bad-ass Vietnamese women battling with swords and guns, while Beemers and motorcycles collide. This immediate violence sets the tone for the rest of the film that relies on common tropes of the genre to move the plot along. The opening credits—flashing in quick MTV-style cuts to match the beats of Vietnamese hip-hop—introduce the members of the young, attractive cast headed by Johnny Tri Nguyen and Ngo Thanh Van (a.k.a. Veronica Ngo).

An Ocean’s Eleven-style round-up of outcasts, they are a group of renegade mob agents on a mission to retrieve a multi-million dollar laptop containing Viet Nam’s top-secret national security information. They wear cool aviator glasses, bear even cooler nicknames like Phoenix and Hawk (the token brawny fool character is, of course, called Ox), and work for a white suit-clad boss-man named none other than Black Dragon. Treated as mere pawns in Black Dragon’s chess game, the core characters have been in the business of bad-assness so long—a dramatic pause here so you can put your sunglasses on and light a cigarette—that they have trouble remembering their real names.

The cast of Clash. Photo courtesy of LA Asian Film Fest 2010.

The scenes build tension in expected ways, playing on questions of who knows the “truth” and who is worthy of “trust.” Tension is, as anticipated, broken with sudden eruptions of violence—cacophonies of gunshots and a surprising amount of the stereotypical martial arts calls of “Hay-ya!” in the hand-to-hand combat scenes. In these and a few other melodramatic moments in the film, I chuckle at the cheesiness of the genre. One of the other young audience members snickers when I do, but I notice that the older Co sitting behind me takes the action and violence pretty seriously, gasping a little each time a blade slices skin. Clash, though, is aware of its chuckle-worthy adherence to clichés, from both the Eastern and Western action movie traditions. At one point, Ox turns to Phoenix (aka Trinh), played by Ngo Thanh Van, and tells her she is “so cheesy like Hong Kong movies.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6QWA-KjwXQ

And, indeed, watching Clash calls for a suspension of the critical eye searching for story and depth. It’s a film meant to be enjoyed on the surface—the “wow” factor of the martial arts choreography and Johnny Tri Nguyen’s handsome face. Never you mind that he only has one (well, maybe 1.5) default expression of model-esque brow-furrowing in every scene, every emotion that his character, Quan, experiences.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to unquestioningly accept Ngo Thanh Van’s Phoenix/Trinh as just another pretty face. The film’s heroine, she is introduced as the stoic, tight-jawed, no-nonsense leader of the group, unflinchingly tough even when an anonymous henchman cracks a bottle over her head. And she fights just as hard, if not harder, than the male characters in the film; her long legs kick high and do some extraordinary wrapping around bad guys’ throats. (The jiujitsu-style leg submission holds are among the most impressive stunts in the movie.)

High-flying kicks in Clash. Photo courtesy of blogomatic3000.com.

Yet, as empowering as Phoenix’s strength may initially appear, it is how she as feminized as Trinh that raises questions of how her character represents Vietnamese women and Viet Nam itself. We see Trinh’s “soft” side as she plays caretaker to one of her partners in crime who knew her before she became Phoenix, and when she mourns or seeks solace on the banks of what looks like the Saigon River, dramatic opera music swells. But her emotions reach their peak when the plot reveals that she is only finishing seven last jobs for Black Dragon in order to get her daughter back—a daughter whom Trinh gave birth to as a result of being sold into a Cambodian prostitution ring when she was fourteen years old. Here, and in other plotlines in the film, Trinh is caught between competing foreign interests.

In an attempt to retrieve the sought-after laptop, Phoenix dons a revealing silken gown to do reconnaissance at the Saigon Sheraton’s upper-crust club where the “Frenchies” who possess the laptop are hanging out. Later, she engages in a bullet-riddled showdown with the very same “Frenchies,” many of whom are caught pants-down with other Vietnamese women, wherein Phoenix/Trinh performs her leg-wrapping magic on the bald, muscle-bound, animalistic French mobsters. Even though she overcomes some of these Frenchmen in a seemingly feminist, decolonizing feat of strength, Phoenix/Trinh loses members of her gang as well (don’t worry, this does not give away the major climax or ending of the film). The battle is a win and a loss. And, in ensuing fight scenes, Phoenix/Trinh faces a one-eyed Triad and also battles her own countrymen.

Of course, most action films feature some kind of foreign enemy, but it seems as though their presence in Clash represents a sadder reality about Viet Nam’s past and present, always caught between other countries. Phoenix/Trinh’s tear-filled pleas for freedom sharpen the point of this underlying reality.

The same goes for the brand name logos of the film’s sponsors that intersperse the film’s end credits as they roll up the screen. This makes me wonder, is it this being continually caught between other countries and their markets that is required for Vietnamese-Americans like me to even see, in the theater (not on imported bootleg DVDs), films from the homeland?

-Jade Hidle

Jade Hidle is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. She aims to write her dissertation on Vietnamese-American literature, with a focus on how narrative structures map struggles of the body–miscegenation, disfigurement, skin color–and identity.

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