Movies

Boy Wonder

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Dang Nhat Minh's Hanoi: Winter 1946 (Ha Noi: Mua dong nam 1946) (1997): It's to be expected that a nation that spent nearly half of this century in a state of war should give its recent history a prominent place in its national cinema; the most unexpected thing about Hanoi: Winter 1946, the first of two films to focus directly on the war years, is how much it has in common with Western wartime dramas. This melodramatic account of the early days of the conflict, when Ho Chi Minh first began his guerrilla war against the French occupational forces, may take liberties with history, but its heavy-handed emotional content follows time-honored generic standards: Guerillas sing heroically, even in battle. Courageous young boys beg to join their older relatives on the front lines. And just as the fighting begins, one character is giving birth. Present but not always central to every major dramatic situation is Ho Chi Minh himself, a fragile yet avuncular figure (the Vietnamese even call him "Uncle") whose hagiographic depiction recalls the friendly Joe Stalin of postwar Russian films; after one attack by the French, he drops off a letter of condolence for the victims but slips away just before it's discovered, the Lone Ranger of the Vietnam War. (RH)

Vuong Duc's The Wild Reed (Co Lau) (1993): A thoughtful contrast to the dogmatic sentimentality of Hanoi: Winter 1946 (the cerebral Thin Red Line to its Saving Private Ryan, so to speak), The Wild Reed is less concerned with creating heroes than with showing war's destructive effect on society. Set just after the war's end, the hero of The Wild Reed is assigned the thankless task of locating and identifying the bodies of soldiers killed in action, a job that eventually brings him home to his own village. In a plot twist that superficially suggests Hollywood farces like Move Over, Darling, he learns that his wife has remarried, believing him to be dead. Surprisingly, The Wild Reed is less involved in resolving that particular point than in showing a country staggering from the effects of a long war. Though the film places no ideological blame (the U.S. isn't even mentioned), itscontinued on next pagecontinued from previous pageportrait of a tragic, war-shocked nation caught in "the jungle of forgetfulness," struggling to find a new starting point, smooths over the few narrative contrivances. Whereas most war films celebrate and defend destruction, The Wild Reed shows a country in its aftermath, facing the more difficult question of living with its own history. (RH)

Vu Xuan Hung's Misfortune's End (Giai han) (1996): Replete with soaring strings, diddling spouses, destructive pride and thwarted love, Misfortune's End, with a few cultural and period tweaks, could pass for what was known in '40s and '50s Hollywood as a woman's film. Ironically titled -- a few false-hope moments to the contrary, the misfortune not only doesn't end but fatalistically compounds -- the movie features a dutiful country wife who's abandoned by an adulterous husband for a sassy, ambitious mistress in Hanoi. Add to the mix the husband's younger brother, who pines unrequitedly for his sister-in-law, and a weasely business rival, who might as well twirl his mustache as he sabotages the pair's nascent textile enterprise, and you have the makings of an old-fashioned heartstring-thrumming melodrama. Thankfully, Misfortune's End underplays the more outrageous aspects of its story, keeping a tight rein on emotions that in other hands would gallop wildly. And if you ignore the contrived foreground action, Misfortune's End offers some endlessly fascinating background in its detailing of Vietnamese rural and urban life, and its exploration of how traditional crafts and modern capitalism are intersecting. (CF)

The films in Contemporary Films from Vietnam play at 8 p.m. June 3-6 at Webster University's Winifred Moore Auditorium: Hanoi: Winter 1946 on June 3; The Wild Reed on June 4; Misfortune's End on June 5; and The Retired General on June 6.

-- Cliff Froehlich and Robert Hunt

Instinct
Directed by Jon Turteltaub

In an early scene in Instinct, released by Disney's Buena Vista Pictures, we're told that a brilliant primatologist named Ethan Powell (Anthony Hopkins) is being brought back to the United States from Rwanda, where for several years he has been engaged in a close study of mountain gorillas. Actually, his study has gone a bit beyond close: For the past four years, Powell has done what no other scientist -- indeed, what no other man -- has ever done. (Except, of course, for Tarzan, who, quite coincidentally, is featured in another Disney picture that opens only two weeks from now.) Powell has abandoned human society to eat, sleep and live exclusively in the wild with an extended family of great apes. During this time, he has had no contact whatsoever with humankind -- not with his scientific colleagues or even his own daughter, Lyn (Maura Tierney).

As it turns out, Powell's return to civilization is not at all voluntary. While in the bush, the doctor's gorilla family is brutally attacked by a group of Rwandan rangers. Rather than allow the animals to be slaughtered, Powell springs to their defense and, in the process, kills two of the rangers. As a result, he is being returned to the States and incarcerated in a maximum-security hellhole in Harmony Bay, Fla., where he will remain until it is determined whether or not he is sane enough to stand trial.

The task of determining the state of Powell's mental health falls into the eager hands of Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a psychiatrist who sees the high-profile case as his ticket to media stardom. If he's lucky and can succeed in drawing Powell out of his silence, there may even be a bestseller in it for him.

What Theo hopes Powell will be able to tell him is difficult to express. It is the secret of the animal mind, the source of their kingly serenity. The sessions between the ambitious psychiatrist and his reluctant subject comprise the bulk of the film. At its heart, the movie is an examination of the forms and nature of power: Who has it (or think they have it) and at what price? Everywhere in the film, these power relationships are laid out. The warden, for example, has power over his guards, the guards over their prisoners, and the stronger prisoners over the weaker. As much as Theo would like to think that he holds the upper hand in his sessions with Powell, he is eventually forced to concede that any superiority is largely an illusion.

That our control over life hangs by the slenderest of threads is a dominant theme during this last decade of the millennium. But about the most that Instinct deserves credit for is making a somewhat glancing reference to the idea. It makes the illusion of sense, and nothing more.

Director Jon Turteltaub and screenwriter Gerald DiPego teamed up earlier on the equally dubious Phenomenon; what they set up here is a comparison between this "jungle" of a prison, where the strong tyrannize the weak, and the real jungles of Africa.

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