Weary of war
The sacrificial heroine is one of the archetypes of Vietnamese cinema whose origins can be traced back to Kim Vân Kiều, which is the great classic of Vietnamese literature. No wonder that the first film we have kept track of - no copy, alas - is an adaptation of it in 1924. "The jealous blue sky has a habit of blaming the fate of rosy cheeks," says this long poem, an apt description of the calamities that will befall Vietnam. Japanese invasion, then war of independence with the French colonial power are not conducive to the development of a film industry. Newsreels, propaganda films cobbled together as a matter of urgency, La Victoire de Môc Hoa (1948) on the debacle of a French operation, made up the bulk of this production. The Soviet director Roman Karmanen made a documentary of a very special kind with Viêt Nam, On the Road to Victory (1954), which is in fact a reconstruction of the battle of Diên Biên Phu, made during the rare moments of respite offered by the war. Pierre Schoendoerffer, who was taken prisoner there, will shoot in Cambodia the first of his many films devoted to the conflict, La 317e section (1965). Two Western productions shot in Saigon stand out at the same time, for cinematic as well as political reasons: Mort en fraude (Marcel Camus, 1957), the story of a smuggler who takes sides in the independence cause, is one of the rare anti-colonialist films of the time, which earned it censorship in the overseas territories even though the last French soldiers had not yet left Saigon. Two years later, A Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1958) distorts Graham Greene's original spy novel to serve an anti-communist discourse forged by the CIA, which foreshadows the Vietnam War. In the North as well as in the South, the fiction cinema, in parallel with the flow of war documentaries that exalt the vietminh victories, is experiencing its first tremors: On the Opposite Banks of the Same River (Pham Ky Nam, 1959) mourns, through a tragic love story, an impossible reunification after the division of the country in two in 1954. A few years later, one of the first major Vietnamese productions, Le 17e Parallèle jour et nuit (Hải Ninh, 1972), will deepen this motif where love and politics are inextricably intertwined. This timid lightening, as shown in Le Petit Oiseau (Trần Vũ, 1962), La Jeune Femme de Bãi Sao (Phạm Kỳ Nam, 1963), or Le Vent se lève, (Huy Thành, 1966) will be of short duration, interrupted by the massive deployment of the American army in the south of the country. In any case, the recurring motifs that will tirelessly run through Vietnamese cinema are already well constituted: stoicism and feminine devotion, bucolic panorama of rural life, war trauma. It is thus the Vietnam War, a conflict whose nightmarish character is abundantly recounted by American cinema(Journey to the End of Hell, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon to name only the most famous), but where the Vietnamese forces most often appear as an invisible threat. On the Other Side of the Mirror, a documentary made under the American bombardments on the outskirts of the village of Vinh Linh, The 17th Parallel, (Joris & Marceline Loridan Ivens, 1968) offers another perspective. "They destroyed everything. The rice was so beautiful. The tanks destroyed everything," one villager in this impressive testimony says. Meanwhile, a few films were a great success in the South, but were irremediably struck with suspicion in the eyes of the 1975 reunified state.
A long transition
At the end of the war, the radical line of the communist regime, a disastrous economic situation and new border conflicts provoke the flight of the boat people, a humanitarian catastrophe poignantly recounted in Boat People (1983) by Hong Kong director Ann Hui. A true Vietnamese cinema is nevertheless in its infancy, an expression that perhaps does not do justice to the formal brilliance of When the 10th Month Comes (1984), a painful and stoic portrait of a young widow. But it was the country's economic opening, consecrated by the Doi moi, or Renewal, in 1986, that finally marked a decisive turning point. Dang Nhat Minh's The River Daughter (1987) makes Dang Nhat Minh the tutelary figure of this emerging Vietnamese cinema and achieves the feat of being both prize-winning and banned in his own country. Also censored, Troupe de cirque ambulant (1992) by the filmmaker Việt Linh, another important name, who later signed L'Immeuble (1999) and Il fut un temps (2002), a twilight tale about a Vietnam that was on the verge of extinction at the beginning of the 20th century. An intimate chronicle of rural life, as its title suggests, Nostalgia for the countryside (Dang Nhat Minh, 1995) offers a picture that contrasts with the squeaky satire of the Woodcutters (Vuong Duc, 1999). In a striking coincidence and a sign of the country's openness, two French directors, Jean-Jacques Annaud and Régis Wargnier, come to Vietnam to shoot films released in 1992 that look back at its colonial past. L'Amant, adapted from the novel by Marguerite Duras, focuses on the colonial remains of Saigon, which has changed a great deal since then, while Indochine, a romantic fresco that unfolds almost thirty years of history, capitalises on the splendour of Along Bay, sown with junks, the Imperial City of Hue and the Red River Delta. These films present the heady, fantastical vision of an outdated Vietnam, not exempt, by the nature of things, from a certain form of colonial nostalgia. In a somewhat factitious way, it is to expatriate directors, known as viet keus, that Vietnam owes its first international spotlight. Thus, The Scent of Green Papaya (Tran Anh Hung, 1993), covered with awards, was shot entirely in studios in the Paris region where a 1950s alleyway in Saigon has been reconstructed. The French-Vietnamese director has only just been awarded a prize for returning to his home country to shoot Cyclo (1995), an urban thriller - almost a first - in Saigon, then in Hanoi for À la verticale de l'été (2000), a serene family chronicle, both equally polished. Three Seasons (Tony Buy, 1999) intertwines several stories, including that of an American veteran who returns to Saigon to find his daughter, whom he left there. Co-produced by an American production company - a first since the end of the war - it initiates a symbolic reconciliation between the two countries. Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo, a rare filmmaker who came from the United States like Bui, made one of the decade's landmark films, Buffalo Shepherd (2004), a pastoral epic through splendid waterscapes.
Profuse promises
In the same year, Lê Hoàng launched a wave of films with Filles de bar, exploring with unprecedented frankness the shadowy areas of the Saigon megalopolis, an indication that censorship is easing. It also signals the advent of commercial cinema, where the genre is finally thriving. Truc Charlie Nguyen specialises in this genre with Le sang des héros (2006), a historical fresco with a grand spectacle, and Fool for Love (2010), a completely honourable attempt at romantic comedy that shows a Vietnamese diaspora finally willing to return to their own country to pursue their dreams - here becoming a successful singer for the heroine. Ngô Thanh Vân, who has just returned from Norway, is one of the incarnations of this dream in reality and the muse of this commercially-oriented cinema: musical comedy (Saigon Love Story, Ringo Le, 2006), action film (Clash, Le Thanh Son, 2009), she is with Johnny Tri Nguyen, with whom she has shared the bill on several occasions, the great Vietnamese star of recent years. The very prolific Victor Vu is one of the main presenters today of this mainstream cinema, alternating high-budget epic films (Blood Letter, 2012), adaptation of a children's literature hit (Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass, 2015), horror and so on. The films that reach our screens are of a different genre, generally intimate and visually polished, such as Vertiges (Bui Thac Chuyen, 2009), which traces a young woman's awakening to sexuality, Au fil de l'eau (Phan Quang Binh Nguyen, 2010), which follows a family living isolated on a boat among the maze of canals in the Mekong Delta, or Phan Dang Di's films such as Bi, don't be afraid! (2010) about a family in Hanoi whose ties have become strained, or Mekong Stories (Phan Dang Di, 2015) about the brilliant illusions of youth at the dawn of the 20th century - and its disappointments. Lost in Paradise (Ngoc Dang Vu, 2011) also portrays Saigon, its out-of-step youth and its outcasts through the story of a young homosexual forced to prostitute himself in order to survive. After a long absence, Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo has signed his return with a minimalist science fiction film, 2030 (2014), which imagines a Vietnam invaded by water against the backdrop of a climate crisis. The third wife (Ash Mayfair, 2019) is in this ultra-classical vein that honours the beauty of the surrounding nature, which contrasts with the violence of the patriarchal traditions inflicted on her heroine. Superproductions (Kong: Skull Island, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, 2017), or a more modest film that looks back at the Indochina War, inspired by the hallucinatory reverie of Apocalypse Now (Les Confins du monde, Guillaume Nicloux, 2018), there is no doubt that Vietnam is once again becoming a haven for foreign and local filmmakers alike.
