On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen 'HOA BINH' MEANS PEACE BY JOHN SIMON Hoa Binh is, believe it or not, the first story film about Vietnam to be seen here, other than John Wayne's insufferably jingoistic and totally...
...Tragicomic: Every group proffers the same grand phrases...
...the pronouncements are so magisterial, they must come from a top-ranking officer...
...Wry: When Hung briefly lands a job as a shoeshine boy, he does poorly because he has to lug Xuan along...
...Maybe, but I'm not sure...
...Coutard's scenario, based on a novel by Francoise Lorrain, is as laconic and unassertive as the eloquently subdued performances...
...It is also the first feature film directed by Raoul Coutard, one of the most distinguished cinematographers of our, or any, time (his contribution to the New Wave is second only to that of its leading directors), and it took two years to reach this country even though it won various awards and considerable critical acclaim in Europe...
...The chief device, besides restraint, that prevents the film from becoming unilateral and cloying is irony...
...The color cinematography of Coutard's long-time assistant, Georges Liron, is decently subdued...
...And each army, in identical fashion, takes away a man or two for execution...
...She is taken off to die...
...this sequence reminds me uncomfortably of an industrial film of some sort, or even a commercial...
...Let me make it quite clear: The film takes no political sides...
...But Xuan Ha as the mother and Phi Lan as the boy are?if I may permit myself the kind of word Coutard would never allow in his script—unforgettable...
...From the scene just described, a dark brown hut interior, he cuts to a dazzlingly hopeful whiteness, on which we then detect a red cross...
...Yet that tiny scene says more against war than all of Johnny Got His Gun...
...The film concerns the period between a Vietnam father's going to join the Vietcong and his return to Saigon on a secret mission some months later...
...There are episodes that do not have the roundedness of a neatly made point...
...These helicopters, planes and large supply ships (the last sailing down canals so narrow that, from a distance, they appear to be moving across dry land) are photographed in all the stateliness, acrobatic bravura, darting energy of a dance of death that seems more choreographed than fought...
...The little girl thinks her brother's struggles to get a pair of shoes to hold still, rather than kick him away, a delicious game...
...somehow, almost miraculously, he and Xuan manage to survive...
...The understatement is not as, say, in a Pinter-Losey film, fraught with pretentious hinting...
...There is the shot of Hung walking through the Saigon market gazing in wonder, a shot repeatedly cross-cut with stacks of victuals displayed in symmetrical arrangements...
...This is not at all the kind of photographic razzle-dazzle that famous cinematographers put into their films when they turn directors —one thinks of men like Jack Cardiff, Nicolas Roeg, Freddie Francis, Claude Lelouch, among others...
...it is simply the expression of an ancient, stoical culture caught in an endurance test that keeps going on almost beyond endurance, and that can be combatted only with even more unflinching acceptance...
...Hung has remained awake, in an anxious vigil...
...The voices are gentle and unportentous, the mother's face composed except for a very slight dent made in it by the pain...
...And something clutches at your throat: What is this race of maladroit, lumbering giants doing here among these small, neat, graceful people...
...That is all...
...It appears in various forms...
...Coutard works by effects so subtle that one virtually cannot use the ambiguous word "effects" to describe them...
...But you will be back...
...An American sergeant, an infiltrating North Vietnamese political commissar, and a Vietcong officer all say that they did not want the war, but will fight for 20 years if necessary, etc...
...with the same pious conviction...
...this once, Coutard lapses into pathos by rapid closeup, cross-cutting among father, doctor, and nurse, with echo-chamber effects on the soundtrack...
...How dare we be tired of the Vietnam war, when we have not had to live with it raging around us, and have done so little or nothing to stop it...
...The plot is minimal, at times awkward, and barely sufficient to give us the sustained sense of a developing action...
...The small child starts crying when this by now unknown man tries to fondle her...
...Although it is almost the very end of the film, it is the first time you see a Vietnamese stand next to an American...
...While Hung is shining a pair of French shoes, two American boots alongside them orate about the American involvement in the war...
...How dare we not go to this film, which is a model of abstention from political propaganda, a paragon of restraint in its treatment of the horrors of war, and, most important of all, a work of art...
...Hung asks...
...Despite her cancer, the mother keeps trudging vast distances on foot...
...I'm counting on you...
...BUT there is also purely jocular irony, as when the young people in a South Vietnamese underground Communist cell are shown to be all rich kids in nice clothes, with expensive bicycles...
...It is the ambulance...
...finally, she can no longer refuse hospitalization...
...It is being distributed as the initial offering of a new company?none of the more established outfits would touch it with a barge pole?and in spite of unanimous raves or near-raves from the local reviewers, it did miserable business during its opening-week run in New York...
...And there is the scene in the hospital when the returning father is told about how and why his wife died...
...Yet how long has it been since you have seen a film that spoke with quiet dignity but irresistible persuasion to your intellect, your heart, the very marrow of your spine...
...An effect like the yellow-outs, green-outs and other color fadeouts, for example, derives its authority from the brightly colored smoke signals to the helicopters at the very beginning of the film...
...Then Hung finishes shining, gets up from his knees, and we catch a glimpse of a cap with three stripes on it...
...Please help this film...
...He steps out into the street, his face almost impassive, and a GI in fatigues walks past him...
...But daddy will be back...
...She is a part-time television announcer, he is the nonprofessional son of lowly workers, and each achieves things on screen that would do credit to some of our greatest actors...
...but if you do, you will notice that he is some two feet taller than the Vietnamese man...
...Just like the one-or-two-line connective narration in French between scenes, which has the sound of haikus or some other delicately understated Oriental poems, the entire film operates with compelling modesty, with a sedulous soft pedal applied to all the sadness, horror, and occasional joy...
...Otherwise, the film is understated, refined, thoughtful, visually eventful, and of a modesty and simplicity which, given the opportunities for their opposites, are tantamount to saintliness...
...It is a very modest work of art, I grant you, and it has little flaws...
...That is all there is to that scene, played in relative darkness, low-keyed in every way, except in the scarab-like brilliance of those large dark Vietnamese eyes...
...He does odd jobs, sometimes successfully, sometimes exploited by greedy older people, sometimes bested by kids more ruthless than he is...
...Even tiny Huynh Cazenas contributes an utterly charming presence as the baby sister...
...It is night in the house of the unsympathetic Cousin Nam, whose earlier hateful glances watched the mother smearing her knee with an ointment that, next to chicken soup, must be the least effective antidote for cancer...
...Please help your soul...
...Their home is destroyed by bombardment, forcing the family to move in with grudging, surly relatives...
...The mother too is awake with pain, and she tells the boy that this time she will just have to go to the hospital...
...They accomplish this almost exclusively with a look, a smile, or a little inflection in that strange, gentle, singsong language they speak, a language not of coarse human beings but of flutes, temple bells, and very dainty cats...
...Tragic: The people are made to fight one war by day and another by night...
...Or take the scene where the father comes out of the nursery caring for little Xuan...
...It looks clean and much nicer than Cousin Nam's place, and it means death...
...It is language reduced to susurration, but a susurration that can break as well as uplift the heart with the sheer force of unobstreperous truth...
...There are almost no false moves, and the humblest incidents can effortlessly carry the burden of large statements that remain rigorously enclosed in implication...
...you see them polishing their elegant spectacles while listening to the most high-minded political platitudes...
...They simply do not belong...
...the relatives make life impossible for the kids...
...How dare we be tired of films about Vietnam when, properly speaking, there haven't been any (except for a few documentaries...
...You stay here and take care of little Xuan...
...the Cong comes and makes them dig up the roads they had to help build for the Americans and government troops...
...But it takes the side of all humanity, and particularly of children, with a sweet, unselfconscious naturalness that has seldom been equaled where the subject was children in war...
...He leaves behind his lovely young wife who resells food she buys in the market to make a precarious living for herself, an 11-year-old son, Hung, and an 18-months-old daughter, Xuan...
...This last scene is shot mostly below the knees—a bootblack's view of the world...
...I don't think so...
...Now starts a long odyssey in which Hung, always taking care of little Xuan as his mother instructed him to do, and holding on to the hat his father left behind, wanders around Saigon...
...You might not even catch this quickly passing figure as you concentrate on the father...
...On Screen 'HOA BINH' MEANS PEACE BY JOHN SIMON Hoa Binh is, believe it or not, the first story film about Vietnam to be seen here, other than John Wayne's insufferably jingoistic and totally inept The Green Berets...
...rather, they have jagged edges that do not join smoothly as an indenture with the next incident...
Vol. 54 • September 1971 • No. 18
