"I must be present in all cases, and light a fire to kill the enemy who destroy my country."
Such a unique film, for me anyway, having seen so many American films about the Vietnam war, those usually revolving around miserable U. S. combat troops fighting an unseen enemy at the behest of commanders who had lost their way. Here the perspective is not only Vietnamese, pre-1954, fighting French colonial forces to liberate their country, but it's also centered on a young woman (Tra Giang, who's wonderful). In addition to scenes of combat, we see female solidarity in childbirth, meal preparation, and child rearing, such fantastic things to include in a war film, speaking to life and caring, and thus emphasizing the tragedy of senseless death. I'm glad this film exists.
Director Pham Ky Nam went to study law in France at 18 but switched career paths to cinema and in the meantime joined the communist party, before returning to Viet Nam at 27 in 1955 to make revolutionary films at the behest of Ho Chi Minh. So it is a North Vietnamese production, but at the same time its heroine is one I have to believe all Vietnamese could identify with, since she's fighting colonial oppression, and we see depictions of French glee at shooting a hobbling civilian and raping her. It's notable that the film is based on a real southern resistance fighter, Ms. Nguyen Thi Huynh, and care was taken to accurately depict the south, in the setting in the mangrove forest (found in Canh Duong), the use of southern dialect, and southern dress, like the ao ba ba and neck scarves. While made at a time when a civil war was taking place (and soon to be escalated with more American troops), it feels very much like a national film - certainly the intention - and deeply personal. Tra Giang certainly channeled her own trauma into her performance, saying decades later:
"I remember the raids, the exploding bombs, the broken families... My father was a revolutionary in Phan Thiet, the French could not capture him so they came to arrest my mother. At that time, my younger brother was still a baby, my second brother and I were very small, we cried out in fear and watched the car carrying my mother far away. Then all three of us stood in front of the house watching every car passing by, because people promised to return our mother, so we thought our mother was in every car. It was that emotion that helped me portray Tu Hau in a similar war context."
As for the production quality, there are beautiful moments in the cinematography and I loved the various camera angles, but you'll also have to put up with amateurish subtitles, at least if you see the same version of this that I saw on the Criterion Channel. I personally didn't mind the issues with English grammar as it was easy enough to follow, but the translation also seemed to have the attitude, "if it's important, I'll let you know what they're saying," which was unfortunate. Well worth putting up with though.
