The world is not
short on Indochinese iconography. From 19th century fetishism about
the landscape as evidenced in the writing of Rudyard Kipling, to the more
contemporary Lonely Planet bucket list money shots, the Indochina region has always
harboured much allure and mysticism that beguiles so many visitors. Amidst
images of Buddhist monks walking in single files, golden spires and earthy
landscape tones, the cultures of the different countries that have emerged from
the tributaries of the Mekong River are often viewed in overlapping hues. The
omnibus film Mekong 2030 draws those lines quite clearly and forms a
revealing study of the physical and spiritual relationships the different
communities have with the river, largely divergent.
Mekong 2030 is a project
initiated by the Luang Prabang Film Festival and supported by a number of charitable foundations, including the Mekong River Commission. Five filmmakers from each of the Mekong-fed territories
ruminate the future of the Mekong river, one of Asia’s most vital waterways, as
well as its players, its threats and its villains. The results are delightfully
distinct, not just culturally but also in terms of the artistic voice. For its
future-referencing title, only one entry valiantly attempted a sci-fi
reimagining of the future – The Che Brothers from Laos, by Anysay Keola.
On second thought, 2030 is actually not too far away. Some of the ‘air-screen’
touch functionalities seen in The Che Brothers might still be fiction by
then. Thailand’s Anocha Suwicharkornpong finds a more conceptual and impressionistic
entry point into the Mekong through the thoughts of a modern artist about to
launch an exhibition. Myanmar’s entry The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong
by Sai Naw Kham, is a rather didactic environmentalist plea for conservation,
probably the least conceptually ambitious of the batch. Cambodia’s Soul River
by Kulikar Sotho imagines a future with a apocalyptic finishing, complete with parched
land, barren trees and a muddy look all over. The Unseen River, the most
meditative of the lot, draws you into a hypnosis with its spiritual contemplations
on the pristine river scape and the pockets of life emerging around it.
The Mekong River is often characterised by its muddy appearance and by either coincidence or visual deliberation, the five short films and their visual palettes seem to blend in with it into an earthy mix, even though each film bears a somewhat dominant colour tone. Soul River keeps it literally grounded with its soil-coloured palette and a vivid sight of muddied waters. The Che Brothers keep our eyes trained on the khaki-clad lead character Xe as he navigates along sandy pathways in a mission to save his mother. The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong remind us of identity through the distinct indigo tribal clothing the villagers wear with indigo symbolising integrity and sincerity in some cultures. The colour white underwrites much of the visual identity in The Line which sets out to reduce and deconstruct commonly-known ideas and elements. The Vietnamese obsession with the colour green is well-documented with the Scent of the Green Papaya being a case in point. Pham Ngoc Lan’s The Unseen River perpetuates this partiality with its not-so-subtle chromatic clues.
Other than pockets
of choreographed kicks and punches in The Che Brothers, much of the omnibus
finds its resonance on the philosophical and spiritual. Many of the filmmakers,
either by chance or by cultural proximity, find similar relationships with the
Mekong River, often imbued with a sense of larger omnipotent forces at play as
well as a sense of karma. In relation to this, Kulikar Sotho’s Soul River
is somewhat a moralistic tale about greed and symbiosis. An ancient Khmer statue
is uncovered and two men made a pact to trade it for money and split the
proceeds. Drifting along on the river on a quaint boat with a straw-laced wagon-styled
canopy, the two men (and the wife of one of the men) engage in chain of road-trip
conversations but mostly centred around monetising their treasure find. While
the banter is sometimes comic and sometimes grating, the film is periodically
punctuated with verbal narration that on one-hand enriches the film’s conceptual
dimensions but on the other straight-jackets the film into something akin to
scripture re-enactment. Kulikar’s directorial strokes appear more confident
here compared to the more scripted attempt in her feature The Last Reel,
as she manages to draw some earnest performances from her cast.
For an
underrepresented voice in Southeast Asian cinema, the Laotian segment of the omnibus,
The Che Brothers, takes an imaginative brave leap from the traditional mould
with actors dressed in computer game-styled battle gear and science indiscriminately
exploited in the hands of villains. There is even American intervention in the
form of a PPE-clad lab worker explaining an impending danger that sounds like
you just switched TV channels sitting in a hotel room in Vientiane. What’s also
delightful is how filmmaker Anysay Keola frames this make-believe drama in Che
Guevaran wisdom, a nod to Laotian nostalgia for the revolutionary icon.
As the story goes,
Xe, the lead character, upon returning to his old village, finds himself caught
in a battle between his sister and brother over the commodification of his
mother’s blood. Apparently, her blood could be sold to an American corporation for
the purposes of developing a much-needed cure for a plague. The extend to which
life imitates art these days is not even funny anymore. Underneath all its
ambition, the film is a fairly even-handed attempt at negotiating the boundaries
between human drama and that of a technological thriller, pretty much a Black
Mirror formula. However, the film falters in dealing with the dualities in
some of the characters. For instance, between being a villain and a next-of-kin
to Xe, the persona transition of Xe’s brother is sometimes clumsy or lacking in
accents.
The Burmese
segment by Sai Naw Kham opens with a soul-stirring aerial view of a vegetated
mountain that screams ‘mother earth’, juxtaposed with a humming melody from a
tribal chorus. Indeed, the segment has a conservational slant to the film. The
lines between fiction and documentation are blurred in the film, not least through
the use of actual indigenous people as cast members. Like many other films
about indigenous identity such as the 2015 Taiwanese film Panay, The Forgotten Voices of the Mekong is faithful to the genre with familiar tropes of urbanisation
threatening nature and tradition, and the return of the prodigal son who wants
the
villagers to trade their hoes to be hoes for industrial money. The film then
takes a karmic turn when one of the village girl [spoiler alert] dies from
drinking river water contaminated by the mining discharge. The rest is rather predictable.
For being the film that most directly addresses the environmental degradation
of the Mekong River, the segment actually feels like a sobering jolt from the trippy
or phantasmagorical quality of the other segments. That’s not say the segment is
too vanilla. In fact, the endearing cast, headlined by a gutsy granny who dares
to defy the industrialists, is the secret sauce that holds our attention to the
story.
My favourite
scene from Thai segment The Line was a rather nondescript one with an
art gallery intern turning up for work, and attempting to connect with her
minders over a news report about some creature being caught (very likely in the
Mekong River) near her hometown. In the exchanges transpiring between the
gallery team, one gets a microscopic study of behavioural shading between
manager and intern, that could give many art gallery workers a sense of déjà vu. Beyond that, much of Anocha Suwicharkornpong’s film is a discordant cacophony of visual
or aural propositions. The Line follows an artist as she puts the final
touches on her exhibition about animism and Henri Bergson’s concepts of space and
duration. Shots of the Mekong River take centre stage in the artist’s installation
video, jarringly paired with a voiceover that sounds like a Mainland Chinese
version of Alexa, talking about her identity and relationships, and on another
level, conveying the idea of cultural invasion. It’s like the familiar feeling
of being at a tourist attraction but hearing fast and furious Mandarin spoken
all around you. One can see the attempt of changing the angle of discourse
around the river through experimentation with form but it gets less interesting
when the perspectives presented all seem to be like those of the filmmaker’s.
Continuing
in the dual-story, dual couple format of his award-winning short Blessed Land,
in The Unseen River, filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan juxtaposes the story of Mrs
Nguyen, a middle-aged woman trying to find her old lover with the story a young
couple seeking a cure for insomnia in a gaudy and kitschy temple that looks
like how a Hollywood set designer would recreate the exotic and mystical Far
East. Inspired by Siddartha, a Herman Hesse book about how one of Buddha’s
contemporaries found enlightenment in a different way, the film is both
visually intriguing as it is spiritually disarming. Pham displays an acute
sensitivity to rhythm and form in his choice of shots and sequences. From the
dog fidgeting in the water to the disembowelling of a fish by the river to the
visual assault that is the room of a 1000 buddhas to the contemplative river
interludes, it feels like an immersive, whimsical dream sequence with hidden
codes to crack. Pham also wears his penchant for visual symbolism and
iconography on his sleeve with portions of the mise en scène revealing a great degree of
orchestration, such as the wide zooming shot of Mrs Nguyen dwarfed by the defunct hydroelectric
plant and the younger monk strategically positioned in front of a towering
religious statue and a cluster of lotuses. At times, the film seems overly self-reflective
with its multitude of visual or narrative cross references but none take away
the observation that The Unseen River anchors the concept of time, memories
and connections most strongly and is rightly positioned as a fitting end to the
series.
Review by Jeremy Sing
Mekong 2030 will be the opening film of the upcoming SeaShorts Film Festival, happening from 12 to 20 of September. You can get your festival pass here.
