2021 was a thrilling year for Vietnam’s cinema, from international acclaims such as Bùi Kim Quy's Memoryland receiving positive reviews at Busan International Film Festival,[1] Lê Bảo’s Taste bringing home the Special Jury Award of the Encounters section of Berlinale, to the Vietnamese government’s ban of Taste from distribution leading to the film’s change of “nationality” to Singapore[2] and the public release of the amended Vietnam Cinema Law draft that alarmed the local film community over film classification and regulations.[3] But let us not forget short film, the humbler form of cinema, that serves not only as an affordable means, a stepping stone for filmmakers to hone their own cinematic voice and become an active creative agent in the wider film industry, but also as a medium to be celebrated in its own rights. A survey of laudable shorts by Vietnamese filmmakers released in 2021 displays a diversity of genres and a pluralism of the Vietnamese consciousness, all of which prove critical to any attempt to delineate the motivations, expressions, and effects of Vietnam’s contemporary cinema, and more abstractly, to find a standpoint from which the so-called phenomenon of Vietnamese filmmaking can be astutely comprehended and orientated.
This two-part essay attempts to draw out two trajectories: on the filmic form and on filmmakers’ narrative ownership. Not so much as inventing new categories of film methodology and aesthetics, Huỳnh Công Nhớ's Grandma’s Broken Leg and La Zung and Chi Nguyễn's Jasmin chart into certain filmmaking niches with a remarkable degree of adeptness. Meanwhile, Julia Feige’s YẾN and Trương Minh Quý’s Les Attendants provide some opportunities to interrogate the identities of filmmakers in relation to the films’ stories: is the identity of filmmaker, particularly on a national level, relevant with respect to not just their legitimacy to tell a story but also viewers’ interpretive capacity? If so, what are the boundaries within which acts of narrative construction and analysis can meaningfully and justly manoeuvre?
A writer and filmmaker maturing from Vietnam’s independent workshop series Autumn Meetings and foreign corporation-backed film competitions, Huỳnh Công Nhớ revitalises the documentary form with Grandma’s Broken Leg. An ingeniously sequenced timeline of videos and photographs shot on his own and from Internet sources, the film humours the idea of faith healing that pervades the mind of the filmmaker’s grandmother whose leg gets broken at some point in the film. The aesthetics of found footage, handheld camcorder, and family photographic archives lend the film an air of investigative journalism. What the investigation finds is an amalgam of scientific evidence of ill health, swelling anxieties, religious fervour, and cynicism.
The narrator is mute, giving other agents the full reign over the soundscape: controversial Catholic priest Joseph Trần Đình Long passionately delivers sermons and leads other religious ceremonies, dutifully watched by Huỳnh’s grandmother through a small laptop screen; believers recount the miraculous healing effects of faith, only to be followed by silent stills of funerary images; the wheels of an ambulance on bumpy roads give off uneven staccato for silent passengers, as if to quell troubled nerves of the ill and their company on the road; and a hospital is brimmed with utterances of medical communication and caring exchanges between family members. At no instance does the grandmother, as well as other family members, address the documentarian or acknowledge his presence.
Yet, the presence of the filmmaker is unmistakable. The camera captures the grandmother within the domestic realm, at a close proximity, and from a position of invisibility that leaves the documentarian unaddressed and unacknowledged by the subject—a privilege that only dear family members could access. The filmmaker makes a witty remark on the potency of faith healing: the footage of nationally renowned comedian-musician-singer Chí Tài narrating his journey of seeking the help of faith to cure him of his leg pain is cut to his funeral portrait surrounded by a wreath of white blossoms. But the editing feels less to ridicule the phoney effect of faith healing than to express the filmmaker’s dread over the uncertainty of his grandmother’s fate and her faith when put under test. Snippets of grandma languishly nibbling rice on the floor of a dimly lit hallway, she diligently watching the church’s recordings even when shrouded in the darkness of the evening, and x-ray images of her broken bones; these images, even left with no words to narrate, speak confidently of Huỳnh’s anxieties. He urgently, almost instinctively, records his grandmother in distress, respectfully not intervening with her religious beliefs but only expressing his utmost worries.
Against the backdrop of a religious figure whose name is surrounded by controversies[4] and a national celebrity who has recently passed,[5] Huỳnh delivers a personal story with contemporary socio-cultural relevance. While maintaining the qualities of a distanced, objective documentarian, the filmmaker delineates not just the qualms of an elderly woman about her faith and recovery when faced with a broken leg, but also of a grandson closely shadowing his agonised, beloved grandmother. In this regard, Grandma’s Broken Leg is an elegant reprise of cinéma vérité: it features no narrator’s voice-over, no soundtrack or audiovisual effects, just plain footage cut up and sewn together; yet the observational storytelling exposes not so much an objective truth but an affecting, personal frame of mind, seeing and emoting at the face of reality.
Digging deep within a single genre of documentary, Huỳnh ingeniously manipulates found and recorded footages to create meanings. Meanwhile, Jasmin epitomises a contemporary attempt to mobilise an assemblage of expressive forms, accomplished by a team of passionate and esteemed creatives in their respective fields: direction by La Zung—acclaimed for his dazzling visuals and synergy between sound, image, and movements—choreography by Chi Nguyễn, poetry by Liêu Hà Trinh, and music by Tùng and mess.. With the support from the Ignite Creativity Grant 2021 of the Goethe-Institut Ho Chi Minh City, the production team was able to realise the capacities of film to capture, reproduce, and transform other creative practices, which is not an easy feat due to the level of expertise required for each artistic component and an interdisciplinary sensibility to gel different creative modalities together into a coherent whole.
Conceived to address issues of discrimination and injustice faced by people of various genders and sexual orientations, Jasmin bears a political urgency and expressive capacity reminiscent of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater, but partly affirms an allegiance with Merce Cunningham for its formalist language. Throughout the film, dancers don minimal and plain undergarments, their cheeks blemished with dripping tears coloured black, their bodies manoeuvring in natural environments—dark forested lands and pebbled, sometimes grassed, clearings overlooking a clear sky; the whole composition is quite a reminiscence of the sceneries and human aggregation found in Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. The landscapes are intervened by mirrors, some of which are broken pieces hung on slender tree trunks; others are whole, of torso sizes and lying haphazardly, or as large as being four metres in diameter, forming a small-scaled, decontextualized theatrical stage amidst the natural habitat.
Jasmin adopts a two-part structure: the antecedent takes the perspective of “THE INSIDER”, while the subsequent “THE OUTSIDER”, cued by title cards of block, bold red text. The section of the insider’s perspective is rendered in the style of slightly grainy, black-and-white, 4:3-framed CRT television. It opens with an inundation of heated exchanges: homophobic insults, anguished retorts, and resolute reasoning on gender equality. The dancers have both cis- and transger representation by the mix-and-match of biological sexes with gendered undergarments and bodily augmentations—corsets, wrapped chest clothes, and chest pads. Against fast-paced, ominous techno music, they frenziedly jerk their body parts, as a coordinated ensemble, as interacting bodies of two, and as individual entities. The scenes are rapidly intercut, adding on to the portrayal of emotional turbulence experienced by non-conformists of gender roles and heteronormativity. As the film transitions to the section of the outsider’s perspective, the palette picks up some cool tones, the frame expands to 16:9, and the tempo takes a dip. Languid choreography is accompanied by a modernist soundtrack that is part melodic and part dissonant. A poem, musically recited, and some lyrics in a ballad tune replace the hurtful cries in the previous section; the spoken words invoke oppressive gender roles, forbidden love, and sentimental plea. If the first part of the film hinges upon exposing the wounds inflicted upon gendered and queered bodies, then the second part could be construed as a call among the public majority to be more sympathetic towards the oppressed and discriminated.
Despite a feast to the eyes and the ears, beautifully and masterfully executed, Jasmin is not entirely effective in its socio-political outlook. It treads an ambiguous ground between politicisation and abstract formalism: on the one hand, bodies are gendered through the interplay between biological traits and gender-normative garments, and sexualised through voice-over utterances and bodily interactions; on the other, the uniform bodily characteristics among dancers, the all-over minimalist, near-skin-tone clothing, and the consistently abstract-expressionist choreography, seem to work towards depoliticising each body into a formalised, emotive entity. Furthermore, the set being a “garden” inhabited by bodies in minimal garments—a symbol of primitivism and humans in their innate tendencies—appears to have overlooked the social constructedness of gender, potentially nullifying any attempts to interrogate the legitimacy of gender roles. Perhaps the “garden” is meant to allude to and argue for the naturalism of non-heterosexuality as primordial acts of love.[6] Notwithstanding, one has to recognise that the struggles endured by people of different genders on the one hand and sexual orientations on the other operate on discernibly distinct sets of logic that are not necessarily in unison.[7] Jasmin’s overt ambition to cover both grounds has therefore capacitated its goals: issues of genders and sexual orientations are merely brought up and unified under a single hood of abstraction that asymptotically approaches an aesthetic of indifference,[8] devoid of contextual specificities to render profound or impactful the film’s socio-political cause.
Although differing vastly in methods and outcomes, Grandma’s Broken Leg and Jasmin share a similar strategy of harnessing the semiotic affordances of filmic elements beyond those in traditional filmmaking to make meanings. Working with low quality footages, Huỳnh relies on his resourcefulness and audacity to inventively put together a praiseworthy film that entails both social commentary and personal affect. The constraints on filmic materials, both in quality and quantity, render Grandma’s Broken Leg at times unfocused and meandering. Perhaps these sensations are a reflection of the filmmaker’s or the grandma’s state of mind; the short film form is therefore apt because insightful revelations are given just enough screen time to take shape without making the editing seem repetitive. Jasmin, featuring a well-thought out two-part narrative involving an array of artistic modes, displays much greater control over the design and execution. It packs a lot more variety of awe-inspiring audiovisual experiences that cohere on a formal basis; however, the medley of identities that it attempts to give importance to are fundamentally disparate enough to resist an all-encompassing system of significations. Explorations and experiments with the filmic form, while should always be encouraged as Vietnamese cinema is still trying to find its footing in the worldwide arena, would therefore benefit from not discounting structural needs—what the film requires to convey its intended ideas—over stylistic ambition.
Notes:
[1] Allan Hunter, “‘Memoryland’: Busan Review,” Screen Daily, October 9, 2021, https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/memoryland-busan-review/5163857.article.
[2] “Revising the Law on Cinematography: A new film censorship and classification system in the making,” Vietnam Law & Legal Forum, December 6, 2021, https://vietnamlawmagazine.vn/revising-the-law-on-cinematography-a-new-film-censorship-and-classification-system-in-the-making-38047.html.
[3] Nguyên Khánh, “Dự thảo Luật Điện ảnh sửa đổi: Không để Luật quay về vạch xuất phát,” Tiền phong, September 6, 2021, https://tienphong.vn/du-thao-luat-dien-anh-sua-doi-khong-de-luat-quay-ve-vach-xuat-phat-post1376503.tpo.
[4] “Linh mục Giuse Trần Đình Long đang vi phạm pháp luật như thế nào?,” Cổng Thông tin Điện tử quận Tân Bình, May 03, 2019, https://tanbinh.hochiminhcity.gov.vn/web/neoportal/-inh-huong-nhan-thuc-tu-tuong-chinh-tri/-/asset_publisher/VN5j2Vj9DHkT/content/linh-muc-giuse-tran-inh-long-ang-vi-pham-phap-luat-nhu-the-nao-.
[5] A devout Catholic, artiste Chí Tài visited the church led by priest Joseph Trần Đình Long in 2019 to seek help for his hurting legs. In 2020, he died from a stroke.
[6] This line of reasoning argues that non-hetereosexuality has a biological basis in humans’ genes, therefore not less natural than heterosexuality and should not be seen as abnormal. While my position is that any such argument is inevitably susceptible to the naturalistic fallacy, I shall not address this potential shortcoming because I am uncertain if Jasmin is indeed committed to this claim, or if the “primitive garden” is merely a stylistic decision.
[7] Briefly put, gender discrimination is primarily premised upon societal expectations and stereotypes based on sex, while discrimination concerning sexual orientation often arises from perceived unnaturalness of homosexuality. As a shorthand example, it is entirely possible that a gay man (or a gay-rights advocate) is a misogynist and a feminist (or a woman-rights advocate) is a homophobe.