*** THE LITTLE GIRL OF HANOI
With Lan Huong, Tra Giang, The Anh, and Kim Xuan.
** THE RETIRED GENERAL
“16 January 1990
This talented filmmaker–who thanks to Apocalypse Now is widely regarded as an “expert” on the Vietnamese war, which for many Westerners is equivalent to the American experience of the war–indeed has a great deal to tell us about our own navel gazing. But to understand the experience of that war (and the gulf war) from the vantage point of the locals–some of whom are automatically excluded from Coppola’s definition of “everyone,” since they foolishly don’t own TV sets or, even more foolishly, don’t believe everything they see on them–it’s possible that we have to spread our nets a little wider. And while some may question why any of us should be interested in the experiences of Vietnamese–especially after our costly, “well-intentioned” involvement in the deaths of over two million of them–others may question why it’s taken us this long to show even this minimal interest.
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The ten Vietnamese films that have been showing at Facets Multimedia since last week, six of which are showing again this weekend, haven’t been broadcast on what Coppola calls “world television.” It’s hard to see how they could be, because the experience they offer isn’t American but Vietnamese; they have been getting exposure of a more limited sort, however, by slowly drifting around the planet at alternative venues. Tadao Sato, the Japanese film critic best known in the West, assembled this package for the Fukuoka international film festival two years ago. He had worried, he said then, that he wouldn’t find enough good films for a series, but he wound up seeing so many good ones that he brought back twice as many as he’d planned. The three I’ve seen–all showing at Facets again this weekend–are indeed eye-openers. If you go to these movies expecting to find something cinematically or ideologically primitive, you’ve got some bracing surprises in store.
