A Film a Week - Daydreamers / Nguoi Mat Troi

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The vampire trope in movies is almost as old as the art of cinema itself. They are invented as something foreign, exotic, usually quite elite that does not belong to the “ordinary world”. There are, however, numerous variations regarding their lore, so we, for instance, got an action hero who was born as vampire and grew to look like Wesley Snipes in his prime or a glittery day-walking, self-loathing highschool kid seeking for some sort of redemption in a soap opera masked as a saga. The point is that the vampires are tough to pin down (pun intended!) because one can vary the rules and the cosmology so much. Vietnamese filmmaker Timothy Linh Bui tried to do so in “Daydreamers” and, after a promising start, failed.

The start is actually an animated sequence set against a voice-over narration which explains how we got such a chic European phenomenon in Vietnam. The answer is, of course, colonialism and debauchery that ensued. The people rebelled soon afterwards (see another parallel with the Vietnamese 20^th century history) and chased the vampires into the illegal. The remaining ones either blended with humans or went to live in the wild, but they had to obey the law that forbade them to taste human blood hoping that the diet of animal blood and humane approach would grant them redemption.

Unfortunately, that cheeky anti-colonial angle stays locked in the first sequence of the film, as the filmmaker and his co-writer Doan Si Nguyen decided to tell a “contemporary” story about what happens when the law gets broken. The story revolves around two brothers, Marco (Thuan Nguyen) and Nhat (Tran Ngoc Vang), a young mortal woman, Ha (Trinh Thao) taken to the vampire underground, and the struggle for power between the “humanist” and “anarchist” fractions within the vampire clique ruled by the benevolent “queen” Trieu (Chi Pu).

Basically, what we get is a one season of a vampire-laced soap opera squeezed in a two-hour movie that feels both rushed and lagging. The trouble is not that Timothy Linh Bui does not understand the concept of vampires and their symbolism, because he apparently does, but the fact that he takes his story way too seriously, but without employing the right means to tell it compellingly.

His directing style is either completely plain in more ordinary, clearly dialogue-driven scenes, or hyper-stylized in the action ones, but the style he goes for is simply derived from video-clips or computer games. Everything is overdone, from the lighting, the abundant use of cheap visual effects (the supervisor Nguyen Anh Viet is signed pretty high up on the ending credits, which is significant) all the way to the omnipresence of music, alternating between the otherwise decent neoclassical score by Jérôme Leroy and MiSS NiNE’s electronic loops. The same goes for acting, which is constantly in the over-expressive register, often over the limit of theatrics, which is not the fault of the actors themselves, as they are instructed to go all in all the time. Maybe some of the saving grace could be found in the attempts of the DoP Phu Nam to capture an occasional eye candy of a shot or the editors Dat Tran and Pham Quoc Dung to calm the things down by delaying their chops, but there is only so much they can do.

Eventually, “Daydreamers” is a trash movie, which might be legitimate if it would be a conscious decision by its director to make it exactly that way. Unfortunately, this is not a case here, as the whole trash seems quite involuntary, as a by-product of a combination of high ambition and sloppy execution.

A Film a Week - The House With No Man / Nha Ba Nu

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Tran Thanh is a popular Vietnamese TV-show host, actor and, from recently filmmaker who has found a formula that works, at least from the financial point of view, with the success of his debut “Bo Gia” (2021, co-directed with Ngoc Dang Vu). The recipe was simple: a family-themed comedy-drama with slight romantic overtones was released in the less-busy winter period and earned over 17 million dollars, mostly domestically and in the nearby territories. With his newest film, and his first solo directorial effort, “The House with No Man”, he upgraded the formula by amplifying the romantic angle and timing the release in the time of the Tet holiday (the fact that it is also close to the Valentine’s Day also helps), and it resulted in the income of 18 million dollars so far, before even opening outside Vietnam.

Originally titled “Nha Ba Nu” (translatable as “Grandma’s House”), the film follows the youngest daughter in a three-generational household, Nhi (Hyunh Uyen An), and her attempts at love and life. The household is commanded by her mother Nu (Le Giang) and the conservative and rough “management style” she employs in the house is similar as the one she employs in the family-owned crab restaurant. Nhi wants to make a career as a designer, but she has to work as a server there, together with her sister, while the brother-in-law (played by the director himself), the only man in the house, but certainly not the man of the house, does the deliveries. The loving grandmother is there to provide some much needed support for the young women.

The things get complicated when Nhi is introduced to the young, rich and handsome John (Song Luan) through her friend. The two fall in love with each other, but the problems occur in the form of their parents. Nu is distrustful towards men in general and John’s parents are basically snobs who reject Nhi because of her class. On top of that, they already met her: she accidentally spilled soup over them in the restaurant. Can love conquer everything once they lose their support network: Nhi her family and John his parents’ money?

No matter how adept Tran Thanh as an actor is, he is still pretty green as a filmmaker, which is one of the core problems with “The House with No Man”. Firstly, the script written by Nguyen Huu Tuong Vi is far from perfect: dialogue-wise, it is too clumsy and it heavily relies on the tropes of the genres it adopts and sheds way too often. Sometimes it is refreshingly counter-intuitive, but more usually it feels like a missed opportunity. For instance, when this Romeo-and-Juliette-type of story takes a turn, we do not get to see a serious story about a young couple trying to make it on their own, but an equally rigid, cliché-ridden melodrama.

The feeling of intensity and extremity is amplified by the equally clumsy directing that aims for exaggeration of basically everything the movie consists of. The music is almost omni-present and always along the lines of the topic of a singular scene. Colour scheme of Saigon in the festive Tet times is beautiful, but camerawork is usually too busy. The actors always work in a through-the-roof emotional register. Finally, the treatment of the film genres is quite simplistic: comedy is on the verge of slapstick, romance feels phony and melodrama comes dangerously close to the realm of involuntary parody with its over-the-top sentimentality.

However, low-brow as it is, “The House with No Man” will have absolutely no trouble finding its audience among those who are looking for a family friendly comedy-drama covered in a thoroughly sanitized romance. But the critics will prove to be a tougher nut to crack.

A Film a Week - Taste / Vi

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The Vietnamese filmmaker Le Bao has already shown a considerable talent with his shorts, but after his feature debut “Taste” he seems destined to be regarded as one of the most promising auteurs of today and tomorrow. Taste premiered at Berlinale’s more daring and avant-garde competition programme Encounters where it was awarded with the Special Jury Prize. For a reason, since it is one of a kind gripping viewing experience.

The filmmaker demonstrates his sure hand right from the opening long take from the fixed position. An ageing local football coach puts the figurines resembling the over-sized chess pawns on a model of the pitch. The dressing room looks “spartan”, its walls are bare and the benches holding the complete team are simple. One face and one figure stands out from the rest of the crew: the African man credited as Bassley only in the closing (played by Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga) is not just taller and larger than his teammates, but he also has his leg in cast, which is a clear sign of trouble. Le refers from contextualizing, as he does not need to, but in that place we should be aware that the professional football is a relative novelty in South East Asia and that the foreign players coming from Europe, South America and Africa usually have the star status. That is, as long as they are fit to do their job.

That is not the case with our protagonist who is about to meet the life quite opposite of stardom. Once sacked from the team, he supports himself by working as a cleaner and an aide in a barbershop in a skid row part of Saigon and living in the back room. At the same time, the four middle-aged women whose names we also get only in the end credits sequence, Hanh (Nguyen Thi Cam Xuan), Thuong (Vu Thi Tham Thin), Trang (Le Thi Dung) and Mien (Khuong Thi Minh Nga) lead their unfulfilled lives defined by the endless, repetitive menial labour in the same part of the town. The “plot”, if there is any to speak of, starts with five of them, Bassley and the four women, moving in together to an empty building. There they live the communal life cooking, bathing, sleeping together, taking care of their beauty and well-being, enjoying the simple entertainment by the means of TV and a portable karaoke machine. The clothes are abandoned and Bassley occasionally has sex with the women. The whole thing seems utopian, but the question is if it can last…

There is almost no dialogue throughout the film, which puts the actors is a position of disadvantage, as they have to play their characters only by the means of movement and gestures, while facial expressions and micro-acting plays the part only in the rare close-up shots. However, the clarity of Le’s vision and the precision of his instructions are impeccable, the actors’ actions are synchronized that they resemble either a ritual or a dream. There are a few monologues in the film, Bassley speaks only in Yoruba (two of his themes are the son he has left behind in Nigeria when he departed to Saigon to earn money and the memory of his first erection), while one of the women also narrates how she lost her family in Vietnamese, raising the issue of language as the possibly obsolete code of the communication.

Another potential shocker of the film is the sheer amount of nudity in its middle section. Surely, there is a bit of eroticism to it, but it is subdued to the sense that everything our quintet does is a sort of a ritual or at least routine. That might also serve as a social commentary of the troubled Vietnamese history of the 20^th century, from the WW2 to the American intervention (some action happening on the bunk bed points to it), but Le does not dwell too much on it, the same way he does not make the crumbling buildings, the austere indoors, the dirt on the streets and the vessel improvized from a gigantic pot the examples of the “misery porn”. If there is any “porn” in the film, it is strictly related to the food and the feasts our quintet enjoys making for themselves.

It is not too hard to trace the influences on Le’s filmmaking style driven by observations and careful staging of the scanty spaces, sometimes to the heart-warming humourous effect. There are traces of Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang, but Le is mostly faithful to himself. In order to achieve that, he relies on the technical crew. The cinematographer Nguyen Vinh Phuc works wonders in the dim lighting and with almost unfurnished spaces (kudos also to the production designer Le Van Thanh), the colouring work of Yov Moor is so hypnotic that the viewer is sometimes convinced that “Taste” is a “shades of grey”-type of a black and white movie, while the meditative editing by Lee Chatametikool suits the film and its oneiric feeling perfectly.

Le was also lucky enough to get the right production team on board, including the former Singapore International Film Festival senior programmer Lai Weijie, whose previous credit is the international success of Kirsten Tan’s “Pop Aye” (2017). “Taste” is one of the biggest revelations of Berlinale and it seems that it will rise to the status of a provocative festival hit on this year’s circuit.