My very first Vietnamese movie and I still think that I should have chosen another happier one than this, my heart became very heavy. Vietnam, tears and smiles, never-ending sighs.
The country was once a modern battlefield so near our city. China and Vietnam, a long and complicated relationship of love and hatred. Since 1975, the refugees hit out newspaper front pages, a theme of a 90-episode local TV series "Passengers" (TVB 1979 "Kuet Zak" - "Choice") and also Ann Hui's movie, "Boat People" is one of them. What kind of life people were living in a country of five consecutive decades' war? I cannot imagine and I don't want to experience.
Hong Kong film industry did help Vietnam develop its own production to a large extent. The very first silent Vietnamese movie was produced in 1933 with Vietnamese subtitles. It was only showed in a French-owned cinema "Eden" in Saigon. And later the very first voiced movie was released in 1938, it was also produced with the help of Hong Kong film makers. In 1954, a Hong Kong film company opened a film production house in Hanoi, that was a Hong Kong and Vietnam joint venture, the very first film was named "Art and Blessing". Vietnam produced its own film in 1957 titled "The same river". Now, Vietnam movie somehow is influenced by French and American films. Anh Hung Tran's movies are now both world-known and well-known.
Long before the film was shown in Toronto Canada in September 1996, a small cinema in town organized "Films on Vietnam" in early 90s and The Retired General was one of them. It is a story of disillusion in reality after devotion to communism. Within 90 minutes, the old man witnesses the sickness of his wife, his brother's struggle to gain money for the family, the adultery of his own doctor daughter-in-law and her repellent dog-breeding way. His agony grows even bigger when he bumps into his previous girl house maid who is caught making a living through prostitution because she could not find any job after being sent back to her own village out of the General "classless" good will. At the end, the shot was made upside down telling the conflicts between his belief and the real life.
The cinema invited the film director to answer the questions by the audience. He got a poker-face yet with shyness and didn't speak much when it came to political issue of the old and also new Vietnam. The movie is an adaptation of Nguyen Huy Thiep's fiction of same name published in 1987, it caused a sensation in the country at that time (by the way, it has been translated in English and can be read on the internet).
The movie makes me remember Mr. Li Zi-song, the ex-Director of Hong Kong's Wen Wei Po, who's deep trust in the Communist Chinese government was crumbled after June 4th in 1989. Disillusion with a life's belief is the most painful.
