As
the National Film Selection Committee was debating which of its three
candidates – Canh dong bat tan (Floating lives), Long Thanh cam gia ca (Ballad
of a Thang Long musician) or Khat vong Thang Long (Thang Long’s aspiration) –
it would submit to the 2012 Oscars, I hoped for “Floating lives.”
The film is based on what is perhaps Vietnam’s
most popular and critically acclaimed work of contemporary fiction. The short
novel of the same name published by Nguyen Ngoc Tu in 2005 has a solid story.
What do I mean by a “solid story?” Whatever filmmakers say about cinema being a
visual art, not story-telling, most audiences want to be told a story when they
watch a movie. A “solid story” to me then reveals something important about
some character(s) with realistic human psychology that somehow touches me. It
is this solidity that I find lacking in almost all Vietnamese submissions to
the Oscars. These movies either tell unimportant stories, or important stories
about unrealistic characters, or most often, important stories about realistic
characters in such a defeatist language that they strangle the love of life out
of viewers.
The committee’s choice turned out to be Khat
vong Thang Long, an unchallenging historical epic about King Ly Thai To, one of
Vietnam’s most revered national heroes who founded the later-Ly Dynasty in the
11th century and Vietnam’s capital, present-day Hanoi. This film is likely to
go unnoticed at the Oscars. “Floating
lives” might not have been noticed either, but this movie has a key ingredient
the other films lack: hope.
A hopeful message or better yet, a sense of
humor about life and human beings – for all of their shortcomings – is
glaringly lacking in Vietnamese entries to the Oscars. Without hope or humor,
or something similar for us to take home, we may wonder why we bother to watch
a movie at all.
Good art should inspire us to live better.
Screenwriter Doan Minh Tuan, who heads the School of Cinema at the University
of Theater and Cinema in Hanoi, last year told a conference that characters in
Vietnamese TV dramas cry too much. As I watched the Vietnamese entries
submitted to the Oscars in recent years such as Mua len trau (Buffalo boy) and
Chuyen cua Pao (Story of Pao), as well as movies that would have been submitted
had it not been for some procedural problems such as Rung den (Black forest),
it struck me that characters in these movies laugh too little. They are mostly victims of a life that is
consistently poor and difficult.
“Buffalo boy” is about the poor and difficult life of southern farmers
in the flooding season during French colonization. “Story of Pao” is about the
poor and difficult life of present-day farmers, especially women, in the
northern mountainous region. “Black
forest” is about the poor and difficult life of present-day northern wood
smugglers. With specific and realistic settings, these films are superior to
the likes of the overly-symbolic Ao lua Ha Dong (The white silk dress), which
is also about Vietnamese poverty and hardship, and was submitted to the 2007
Oscars.
Vietnamese filmmakers can certainly win
cultural prizes and plenty of tears and sympathy from international audiences
with their tales of struggle and poverty. But after they present the problems
of life, these filmmakers’ solution is uniformly resignation to fate. They thus don’t really offer the world any
new answer to the ultimate question of art: how should we all live? This
submissive attitude toward life is reflected by Pao, the heroine of “Story of Pao,”
in her final lines that close the film:
“After a long journey, I came to understand an important idea: No matter
whether it’s in sorrow or joy, everybody has to try to live his life till the
very end, though more often than not, sorrow it will be.”
Vietnamese literature is doing much better
than this. If “Buffalo boy” and “Story of Pao,” which are based on well-known
short stories, were more faithful to the originals, they would have been much
better. Writer Son Nam’s short story Mua
len trau is different from Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh’s movie, “Buffalo boy.” The
latter has many new details that turn the former on its head. Nam’s
heart-warming and humorous story about the disadvantages – and advantages – of
the rainy season for rice farmers in southern Vietnam becomes a depressing
movie about the brutality of rain against man, and of men against women. This
same destructive creativity, if I may, is obvious in Vuong Duc, who directed
“Black forest” in 2008, and earlier adapted Nguyen Huy Thiep’s short story,
Nhung nguoi tho xe (The woodcutters) into a movie of the same name. I was
almost angry when I watched Vuong Duc’s adaptation. In the movie “The
woodcutters,” Thiep’s imperfect but charming hard-boiled hero becomes a
repulsively vulgar man driven only by primitive sexual instinct. Thiep’s idea
of finding a balance between an idealistic and realistic attitude about life in
order to survive in the woods is transformed into a narrative about the failure
of both idealism and realism, and man’s efforts to survive in the wild without
any alternative.
Director Bui Tuan Dung recently told me that
“Floating lives” “doesn’t outdo the literary version,” and I agree. But this
film should be applauded precisely because it doesn’t try to be smarter than
the original. Instead, it remains faithful to what is good about Nguyen Ngoc
Tu’s work: delivering a hopeful message about forgiveness. Though they both portray the harsh life of
southern farmers who must fight the brutality of nature and man, the movie
“Floating lives,” directed by Nguyen Phan Quang Binh, is able to capture the
genuine generosity and well-known strength of the southern farmer that “Buffalo
boy” fails to portray. Binh does this by staying close to the original
literature. Nuong, the heroine in “Floating lives,” decides to raise a child
she bears as a result of rape and names it “Thuong” (“love” in Vietnamese)
because she wants to teach her child how to “forgive the mistakes that adults
make.” On the contrary, Kim, the hero in
“Buffalo boy,” whose father and uncle rape women and who almost commits the act
himself, goes through life depressed because life is so hard.
To this observation about defeatism, I except
Tran Anh Hung’s Mui du du xanh (The scent of green papaya), the only Vietnamese
movie that was short-listed at the 1993 Oscars, Ho Quang Minh’s Bui hong (Gone,
gone, forever gone), the submission to the 1996 Oscars, and especially the
movie that wasn’t submitted for the 2004 Oscars because of procedural delay, Do
Minh Tuan’s Vua bai rac (Foul king), which was bought by Quebec-based BM Film International
to distribute in the US and Canada for 10 years, the first achievement of its
kind for a Vietnamese movie. Tran Anh Hung’s movie is stylistic and optimistic
but it’s too obsessed with the superficial details of Vietnamese culture to
really matter to Vietnamese audiences. Ho Quang Minh’s film about Buddhism is
similarly flawed. But Do Minh Tuan’s
movie isn’t concerned with presenting Vietnamese culture. It is about the life
of hard-working garbage dealers, but the story is one of joy and hope amidst
trials and tribulations. Trong, the hero of “Foul king,” is the leader of a
gang of garbage dealers who rules with an iron fist but becomes softer as he
falls in love with a kind-hearted banana flower seller. However, to this
combination of realism and romance, Tuan adds style when he sets up a happy
ending in which Trong makes up with his girlfriend after a fit of jealousy at
an installation art exhibition he organized at his garbage dump. We are thus forced to distance ourselves from
this obviously artificial ending and the film’s overall optimism because
whatever is hopeful in the film might just have been “installed” by Tuan
himself. Life may be different. Such reflexivity is rare in Vietnamese cinema
and makes this film superior to all Vietnamese submissions to the Oscars. With
humor, a quality that “Floating lives” lacks, “Foul king” has both a complex
message and style, and suggests an effective strategy for bringing the
uniqueness of Vietnam to the screen without cliché and melodrama.
By Thuy Linh, Thanh Nien News
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