Born to a Vietnamese mother and a German father, Julia Diệp My Feige writes and directs YẾN to tell the story of a woman in her early twenties navigating, seemingly with a nonchalant attitude, around societal norms in present-day Hanoi, on the threshold of the Lunar New Year. Having moved to Hanoi alone, the eponymous protagonist, who is pink-short-haired and lip-pierced, lives in a rented room with two feline companions. A call with her mother touches on her romantic life and preparation for the festive season, neither of which appears to have any noticeable presence in her life nor be something that disconcerts Yến. While strolling in a fabric market and greeted with blunt remarks about her adrogynous and non-Vietnamese look to which she seems to have become desensitised, Yến chances upon an old male acquaintance. An afternoon, an evening, a night, a morning together, their lives briefly intertwine, more to occupy Yến’s straggling head space than to fortify anything that lasts.
A logic of difference is at play: the protagonist does not conform to the archetype of a Vietnamese woman, both physically through her adrogynous and non-Vietnamese features, and mentally, evident in her disregard for national new-year pastimes of home decoration and taking photos at public floral gardens, and her indifference to having a stable relationship to present to parents. This yields a cool, aloof texture to the film that infringes the conviviality that usually comes with the festive season. The “violation” is fitting in the context of the film. Người buồn cảnh có vui đâu bao giờ;[9] Yến, an alien by appearance in the eyes of local passer-bys, alone in Hanoi and in the temporary company of an old acquaintance, has her melancholy projected onto the filmic atmosphere.
Feige describes the piece as “oscillat[ing] between documentary and fiction,” and writes that her aim is to “make a film from a perspective within being raised by a Vietnamese mother and a German father.”[10] This suggests that Feige’s personal, bi-racial life is the materials for YẾN to come about, that Yến's moods are in fact Feige’s, that Yến’s made-up life and situation are a vehicle for Feige to channel her inner thoughts and sentiments. Had someone who has no Vietnamese blood, especially a Euro-American, written and directed the film, it would have raised eyebrows for suspicion of implicit prejudices and a potential failure to give the situatedness of a Vietnamese experience due consideration when realising a cinematic vision. Despite her partial Vietnamese blood, Feige is not necessarily shielded from such scepticism, given that her previous short film EVA (2020), where she writes, directs, and acts, operates on a “white feminism”[11] that makes no attempt to acknowledge her Vietnameseness. An intersectionalist critique of EVA is not necessarily warranted owing to the film’s context of production and exhibition being contained within the European circuit; however, YẾN is up to greater scrutiny: does Feige, only half-Vietnamese by blood and growing up and practising art for the most parts of her life in Germany, construct a filmic world that is grounded in the sociocultural reality, or does she simply use a fictional Vietnamese identity and livelihood as an “exotic” instrument to advance the filmmaker’s agenda and narrative?
It should be noted that Feige is rather vocal in her statements on YẾN, asserting that the film is made with an attitude critical of the traditional Vietnamese belief system—one that oppress female, queer individuals.[12] Despite the bombastic allegation that borders on being a sweeping, snobbish account of the socio-cultural reality of contemporary Vietnam, said overtly reproachful sentiments do not realise distinctively in the cinematic form. Rather than portraying in the moving images an antagonism between societal and personal beliefs, the film locates the supposedly oppressive social mores in a mother’s inaudible words to her daughter, compulsive remarks of unseen passer-bys, and the protagonist’s own ruminations. The allegedly critical attitude is subdued, as if to save YẾN from overstating its socio-political motivation. Proffering no damning diagnosis of Vietnamese society in the film nor definite resolutions to conclude it, Feige circumvents the potential pitfall of forcing a saviour mentality onto a culturally and geographically situated society whose comprehension and critique demand more than just a convenient allegation premised upon a reductionist East-West binary. What ensues instead is a non-confrontational mood piece that centres around the protagonist’s subjectivity, whereby societal norms, rather than being analysed by a critic, are felt through the mind of a “sad girl”.[13]
A different dynamic is found in Trương Minh Quý’s Les Attendants (English title The Men Who Wait). Trương was born and grew up in Vietnam, and Les Attendants is his first film made outside his homeland, also one among the two works that culminate from Trương’s two-year stint at Le Fresnoy studio—an audiovisual research centre in France.[14] The film is sited on a forested slag heap in France that used to be a coal mine, now a venue for gay cruising. Embraced by a daylight orchestra of winds gusting and leaves rustling, a man of mature years casually waits in the forest for a sexually interested passer-by. Once met, the two men spare no reservation in their love-making, devouring every sensation of skin-to-skin contact. They remain unfazed or perhaps even get turned on by a nearby voyeur—a homeless migrant who has been sheltered by the unsuspecting woods. He backs away upon realising that his presence has been noticed, going back to the routine activity of collecting water down the slope, with bare feet treading, buttocks resting, and head laying flat on black soil—remnants of a bygone mine. On a daisy-patterned blue mattress, the pair of men untangle their naked bodies after having done the deed. One man fills the post-coital blank with reminiscence about his father who used to work in a coal mine and who he suspects too is gay. But once the deed is done, any attempt to prolong the intimacy seems like a lost cause.
Made entirely with analog equipment i.e. shot on 16mm film and edited with a Moviola, the film reminisces an earlier era of filmmaking. The aesthetic corroborates Trương's layering of histories, harked back by material and spiritual remains of the filmic present. The public history of an economic activity of mining and a social phenomenon of migration intertwines with the private history of a family, relived in spatially situated and behaviourally configured subjectivities, or living in mental replays into contemporary times. As if a constant reminder of the time that has passed, gay bodies are inscribed with signs of age. A wrinkled hand fumbles to take a beanie off someone else, revealing a bald head that gets caressed in matching rhythm with a blowjob.
Some filmic treatments in Les Attendants have precedents in contemporary cinema. Trương's so-called “queer forest” bears a formal and strategical similarity with the works of French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie. Guiraudie’s forests are a site of “multiple identities and dimensions,” of “turbocharge[d] libido and pleasure,” of “brutal murders,” and of “escape, healing and inspiration.”[15] Similarly, Trương's woods are many things at once. In them, personal affects are multifarious and criss-crossing: inhabiting the forested slag heap, however momentarily, not only offers a promise of sex but also recalls collective and individual memory, and sex not only quenches carnal desires but also prompts familial reminiscence. Depiction of gays not as passionate youths but some wilting elderly is also explored by the recent film Supernova (2020), written and directed by Harry Macqueen, albeit in a vastly different register.
Contrary to other works of white men making films about white men, Trương, a Vietnamese on a stint at an institute in France, writes and directs a film featuring a slice of European demographics. The seeming mismatch between the identity of the writer-director and the context of the film is a commonality between Les Attendants and YẾN. However, unlike Feige’s placement of the Vietnamese female experience at the heart of YẾN and her attitude of incredulity towards the alleged injustice embedded within Vietnam’s social norms, Trương’s thesis chiefly concerns abstract themes of gay intimacy, history, home; the context of a slag heap in France, although a crucial setting for Trương’s thematic interests to materialise in a tangible reality, retreats into the background. But the situatedness of the film is far from simply a poeticised pretext for the filmmaker to push for his interested subject matters. Rather, when read as part of Trương’s oeuvre, Les Attendants represents his continued interrogation of selected facets of the human condition[16] that transcend national boundaries, all the while being meticulous about socio-cultural particularities by not just observing contemporary phenomena and responding to them through acts of representation or criticism, but also, as part of the creative process, excavate the composited histories that necessarily forge the present.
Feige and Trương are similar in the sustenance of their artistic concerns—feminism for Feige and memory, history, and home for Trương. Yet, the judgements of their works as presented in earlier sections differ: while suspicion towards trans-geographical feminism is accorded to Feige’s story of a non-conformist Vietnamese woman, appreciation is bestowed upon Trương’s rendition of French gay cruising. The disparity ought not be read as acquiescence to a social climate of “wokeness” or accession to a psychoanalytical commitment that regards concepts of sexuality, memory, and home as subliminal, underneath the stratum of social constructions. Instead, it is a question of how cultural sensitivity is exercised in tandem with the film’s political implications, implicitly conveyed or explicitly asserted. In this respect, both Feige and Trương are successful. Feige’s avoidance of a condemning depiction of Vietnamese society and her emphasis on poeticised sentiments constitute not a dogged attack at Vietnam’s social mores but an attempt to portray and better understand a subjectivity being at odds with societal viewpoints; recognition of any injustice in Vietnam’s social configuration would thus likely arise from viewers’ reckoning of the film in reference to their lived conditions, saving YẾN from potential charges of insensitive intrusion of ideology. Trương adopts a different strategy. By locating the creative process around a specific site that stirs him,[17] Trương was able to pursue his thematic interests at no expense of sidelining historical and social particularities of a geography that he himself is a guest in.[18]
An inspection of four Vietnamese short films in 2021 certainly does no justice to the variegation of Vietnamese contemporary cinema, but it does show the depths of some issues that Vietnamese filmmakers are grappling with—idiosyncratic and pressing artistic concerns, experimentation with the filmic form, and ethics of filmmaking. Not all films yield satisfactory or foolproof outcomes. Still, they signify a genuine desire of a thriving community of Vietnamese filmmakers to speak the language of films, even if having to navigate around the intricacies of the medium, so that their individual expressions are objectified into a more durable form, their voices are heard by populations far beyond national boundaries, or simply to celebrate the beauty of films. Even in the face of the challenges to the infrastructure of independent Vietnamese filmmaking, one could perhaps stay hopeful about the outlook of Vietnamese cinema in years to come.
[9] From early 19th-century poem The Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du, this line says that when man is in grief, sceneries are rarely cheerful.