L'arbre aux papillons d'or

Watching Thien An Pham's debut film, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, I was immediately captivated by a journey that, for me, feels less like a movie and more like a meditative experience. It's a slow-cinema gem that invites you to float through an ethereal Vietnamese landscape, exploring grief, spirituality, and the search for meaning in a deeply personal and mysterious way, bringing to mind masters like Tsai Ming-liang.

The cinematography by Dinh Duy Hung is just stunning, capturing the natural beauty of rural Vietnam with exquisite detail. The camera moves with the slow, deliberate pace of a cargo ship, using long, continuous shots that force you to absorb the world alongside Thien, feeling the minutes pass as he rides his scooter through green hills and dirt roads. This refusal to use quick cuts or dramatic close-ups creates a sense of immersion that you rarely see in modern cinema.

The story, which unfolds in a realistic style, blurs the lines between past and present, reality and daydream. Thien's interactions with a few key characters, like the regretful old soldier and the nun from his past, aren't just plot points-they're reflections on mortality, guilt, and the search for decency. The film's refusal to give you easy answers invites you to fill in the gaps with your own thoughts, turning the silence and long shots into moments of real introspection. The movie is deeply involved with Vietnamese Christianity, but it never suggests that the truth lies in just one belief, instead using religion as a way to explore the spiritual landscape.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a masterpiece of art-house cinema, a film that demands patience and commitment from the viewer. If you're looking for an experience that takes you on a spiritual trip, that rewards contemplation, and that uses filmmaking in a masterful way to create a hypnotic atmosphere, then it's absolutely worth watching. It's a film for those who are willing to be guided on a journey that isn't in a hurry to get to the end, but finds beauty and depth in every step of the way. However, if you're looking for a fast-paced story, a plot with clear answers, or a film that follows traditional rules, this movie might be a frustrating experience. It's a meditation on life, death, and time, and its value lies in its ability to make you slow down and just be.

Finding meaning and purpose in life can be a long and solitary journey, especially if one doesn't know how or where to look. So it is for a single, lonely thirtysomething seeker (Le Phong Vu) living in Saigon after moving there from his rural mountain village after most of his family emigrates to America. He feels empty and lost as he looks for a suitable path to follow, but nothing turns up, leaving him increasingly adrift and unfulfilled. However, when a family tragedy occurs, he must return home to pay final respects to a deceased loved one with his young, orphaned nephew (Nguyen Thinh) in tow. The journey thus becomes a metaphor for his search, an absorbing meditation on life, love, death, finding oneself and letting go of old ghosts from the past, including an old flame (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh) who now has a more serious commitment. This odyssey is fittingly depicted cinematically with a series of long tracking shots and deliberately slow pacing to emphasize the extended time it takes to make such a measured, thoughtful and revelatory passage, one beautifully enhanced by positively gorgeous cinematography. It's the kind of film that gives similarly situated viewers much to think about, particularly given that they're likely to relate to the circumstances of their on-screen counterpart. However, writer-director Thien An Pham's debut film - winner of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival's Golden Camera Award for best premiere feature - could benefit handsomely from some judicious editing, especially in the second half. While this release is definitely a feast for the eyes, some sequences nevertheless go on needlessly long and could have been cut by about 20-30 minutes to reduce its patience-trying three-hour runtime. This shortcoming aside, though, "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell" gives audiences a revealing look at the work of a gifted new talent with tremendous potential, one who successfully brings both beauty and inspiration to an insightful finished product. As trite as it may seem, finding our place in the cosmos rests more with the journey than the destination, as the protagonist discovers for himself, a realization many of us can no doubt relate to.

I don't see the point of reviewers who say a movie like this is slow and boring, and "nothing happens." (If you want a movie where indeed nothing happens, try "Goodbye, Dragon Inn.") Sure, there are longueurs, and not all the plot choices are good ones. But there is a quiet beauty about this film, and it is at its best deeply pleasurable. Some of the scenes and framing are like pictures in a museum. The uncertainties of time, place, and characters I often find annoying in other films are less irksome here. I think viewers who appreciative this kind of slow-paced movie, and are less concerned about a pulsing plot than an absorbing sensory experience, will like it.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell won the Camera d'Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and after viewing it, I can see why.

It's a extremely beautiful looking movie with strong direction from Pham Thien An, great sound designs, and interesting themes and concepts explored within the movie. The themes about Vietnamese culture, souls, loss and reconnection are explored throughout as Thein An captures the tone, atmosphere and environment with his directing style and approaches onto the narrative. Many of the camerawork, soundtrack, sound designs and the uses of the performances from the cast are visually breathtaking and felt realistic.

Many of the dialogue moments is pretty strange but it felt like a spiritual experience or poetic style of writing that felt purposeful and fits the setting within the characters and story. For a run-time of 182 minutes, it is slow and it will be tough for many viewers but I personally was observed and invested throughout understanding the hidden meanings and the life styles of Vietnamese culture and the themes explored.

Overall, it's a refreshing to see more Vietnamese cinema.

Watching this film feels like sitting for three hours in a sauna waiting for something that never comes and that I don't even care about.

Usually, I love contemplative film where nothing happens. But it should come with a mastery in mise en scene, and a certain sobriety. Artistic boldness should still hold the audience for the duration to the very end. Yet this film offers nothing beyond its self-indulgent ravishing photography. The filmmaker clearly wants to inflict suffering on the viewer, but this experience is purposeless. And this sense of purposelessness, which one may assume is the philosophical meaning that the film tries to suggesst, is forced upon the viewer through half-hearted dialogue. In fact, the dialogue didn't hold enough attention in relating to the material around it to make it interesting.

It's simply an international coproduction by a Vietnamese filmmaker indented for highbrow international critics and festivals, made for the sake of being clever and 'cinephile'.