Set in the rural district Quế Phong of Nghệ An province in the North Central Coast region of Vietnam, Retrace follows a boy named Xu with his father returning to their hometown due to the recent passing of Xu’s grandfather. The postmortem activities and sentiments are seen through a meditative lens that straddles between dreams and reality, between fiction and ethnography. Ultimately, the film is a geographically situated thesis on grief and mourning by writer-director Trần Thị Hà Trang.
The film opens with a wide-angled shot of a densely vegetated landscape, tinged blue by a persistent downpour. The pair of father and son, covered in semi-transparent raincoats from head to toe, tread a footpath that cuts through the vegetation and is flanked by a buffalo, an animal indispensable to traditional agricultural practices in Vietnam and whose imagery has been a crucial part of Vietnamese folk culture. They arrive at the family’s home—a stilt house made out entirely of woods—when the sky has turned dark. Illumination of the interior by oil lamps and candles, together with translucent fabric veils serving as room partitions, yields an ethereal quality to the family reunion. The atmosphere of spirituality is magnified by uncanny audiovisuals: water overflowing from an indoor plant pot and termites incessantly buzzing both in reality and in dreams; these imageries appear to suggest the irrefutable effects of supernatural forces on the mortal world. Conversations span from bewilderment about things from memory that no longer exist in real life, about recollections that seemingly stem from dreams, to ponderance about the value of old domestic objects, possibly a distraction from the need to grapple with the elder’s passing but nevertheless an oblique reference to it that eventually precipitates talks surrounding the subject at hand.
An issue pertinent to the arrangements for the funeral has to do with ethnic relations. The family belongs to the ethnic majority of Vietnam: the Kinh people. A few generations back, the family’s ancestors migrated to the current hometown which is home to Thái people, an ethnic minority in the country. The family, cognisant of ethnic difference, contend whether they should seek help with funerary activities from fellow villagers. While the village chief assures the family not to worry and the funeral proceeds with assistance by the village members, the hesitance to ask for communal help, which is customary for Thái people, hints at some ethnic tensions, so rarely seen in Vietnamese cinema or even in the country’s public discourse and consciousness.
The funeral proceeds in accordance with the traditions of the Thái people. The corpse could be kept in the house for several days, traditionally meant for the funeral to take place on superstitiously harmonious days; the coffin is to be carved from a tree trunk; a buffalo is to be killed as offering, so that the deceased would have a means to agricultural work in the otherworld.
Thái people’s view is that “vạn vật hữu linh”—everything has a soul. When a person dies and their corpse remains in the house, their soul still lingers in the mortal realm. The funeral then functions as an event to send the soul of the deceased to the afterlife, called “mường trời" in the indigenous belief system. It is this transitory period between life and death that Retrace specifically targets. Near the end of the several-day-long funeral, Xu’s father passes to the young boy his grandfather’s hat. Later that night, Xu, while resting his upper body onto the coffin, falls into a dream where he reunites with his grandfather. But the reunion does not last long. The grandfather diminishes in size relative to the camera frame as he crosses a river and walks up to an open grass plain occupied by a buffalo, which seems to be the same one that is slaughtered earlier in the film. The whole scenery soon turns ablaze, alluding to the act of cremation in real life. Shrouded in flames, the grandfather sees a termite walking along his wrinkled forehand. The termite flies away and lands on the bark of the tree that Xu is on. The tree rapidly burns from its inside, implying that as the grandfather passes, something in Xu dies too.
What renders the many outdoor scenes so affecting and thus crucial to the story is the skilled camerawork by cinematographer Dương Minh Thái. Besides providing crisp images throughout the whole film, he delivers mesmerising long shots of Vietnam’s rural sceneries impregnated with calming but at times unsettling stillness. This condition aptly reflects the bereavement and tension that pervades the atmosphere among family members upon reuniting for a sombre occasion.
Despite the profusion of mostly stunning and ostensibly thought-provoking imageries, Retrace does not quite strike an emotional chord. The absence of an account as to why a boy so young would meaningfully mourn for his geographically distant grandfather makes it hard for viewers to be emotionally invested in the story. The film thereby could seem more like an ethnographic project of an ethnic minority’s funeral rather than a culturally situated and coherent story about grief. Presented for the most parts solely with disparate, factual observations of the funeral where surreal elements appear more ornamental than instrumental, viewers exit the film with few clues about what each character feels about the passing of the elder. The film ends with more empty feelings than it could have avoided.
Review by Dan Tran