Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [395]
Even The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), filmed entirely in Paris by French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, is a fondly nostalgic period piece in which the East’s languorous elegance and beauty are shown, minus its squalor, and nothing of import is said about the war experience. Tran Anh Hung’s second film, Cyclo (1996), is an altogether different matter, a grimy tale of murder and prostitution set in a bleak rendition of Ho Chi Minh City – so bleak that the film is banned in Vietnam. Nevertheless, Tran Anh Hung obtained permission to shoot his latest offering, At the Height of Summer (aka The Vertical Ray of the Sun, 2000), on location in Hanoi. It’s a gentler film with the same languid, dream-like quality of Cyclo, in which three sisters prepare to commemorate their parents’ deaths. As they do, the dark secrets lying beneath the mask of middle-class respectability are gradually revealed.
The censors lightened up a little more in allowing Vietnamese director Dang Nhat Minh to make his ground-breaking The Season of Guavas (2001), which deals with the extremely sensitive issue of 1950s Communist land reforms – the film, however, has yet to be released in Vietnam. Other Vietnamese directors beginning to attract an international audience include Tran Van Thuy (Sand Life, 2000), Bui Thac Chuyen (Course de Nuit, 2000) and Le Hoang, whose stark portrayal of prostitutes in Bar Girls (2003) caused a major stir. That the film was made at all is thanks to a radical change of policy at Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, which in 2002 stopped vetting scripts and allowed private film studios to start making films.
In Hollywood’s output, Vietnamese people have mostly been noticeable by their absence, or through the filter of blatant stereotyping. Heaven and Earth (1993), the final part of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy, went some way towards rectifying this imbalance. Its depiction of a Vietnamese girl’s odyssey (based on the life of Le Ly Hayslip; see "The American War"), from idyllic early childhood to the traumas of life as a wife in San Diego, symbolizes the trials and tribulations of the country as a whole, and acts as a timely reminder that not only Americans suffered during the struggle. Almost a decade later, Randall Wallace brings a certain impartiality to We Were Soldiers (2002), his adaptation of Lt Col Hall Moore and Joe Galloway’s blow-by-blow account of the catastrophic battle of Ia Drang, with Mel Gibson as the caring commander. Not that it met with Vietnamese approval: the government banned the film, saying it distorted Vietnamese history, and branded actor Don Duong a “traitor” for his portrayal of the NVA leader pitting his wits – and his men – against the Americans.
Only in the late 1990s were American movie-makers allowed to shoot on location in Vietnam again. Filmed in Ho Chi Minh City, Three Seasons (1999) was directed by Vietnamese-Californian Tony Bui, and features Harvey Keitel at the head of a predominantly local cast. It provides a lyrical and graceful portrayal of a city trying to come to terms with the return of the West – personified by an ex-marine (Keitel) looking for the Amerasian daughter he abandoned decades before. The film doesn’t dwell upon the war – the state censors on set during filming made sure of that. Nevertheless, by focusing upon the disenfranchised prostitutes, cyclo drivers and street children of the city, it ensures that the conflict’s ravages are implicit. In 2004, Hans Petter Moland broke new ground with The Beautiful Country, in which a Vietnamese Amerasian, Binh, flees hatred and abuse to search for his GI father.
It took until the new millennium for a big-budget Hollywood movie to be filmed almost entirely in Vietnam. Philip Noyce’s atmospheric remake of The Quiet American (2002) sticks much closer to Graham Greene’s novel in its indictment of American involvement in Vietnam. This, coupled with its portrayal of the Vietnamese struggle as a patriotic fight against colonial oppression, earned the film official approval, allowing it to be screened widely