EVEN ONE new cinematic angle on the subject of Vietnam would have been welcomed. This week we have two. The San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, stopping in San Jose March 19-20, brings us Phan Dang Di’s Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! and Saigon Electric by Stephane Gauger.
Raised in Orange County, Gauger (The Owl and the Dragon) worked with Sunnyvale’s local heroes the Bui brothers on Green Dragon and Three Seasons. The Buis are fairly elliptical as indie filmmakers go. Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! is sometimes puzzling, just like Tran Ahn Hung’s films (The Scent of Green Papayas and Cyclo); making it a smaller world, Tran co-produced Bi.
The unsaid and the elliptical have no place in Saigon Electric, clearly built with commercial potential in mind. Perhaps future episodes of the Step Up franchise will take the saga to international cities? Saigon might be a start.
On one inner city block, Gauger shows us a community of street kids; their Adidas logos, breakdancing, Major League Baseball hats, Krylon murals and kanji tattoos mark them as rebels who must have freeze-framed MTV to get every detail of their rebellion perfect.
Onto this block comes a traditional country girl, Mai (Van Trang), who is attending the dance academy. She fails. Uncertain of what to do next, she keeps the room she’s rented from a hard-drinking oldster (Phan Tan Thi). At a restaurant job, Mai meets the tough and spiky Kim (Quynh Hoa); Mai is part of a troupe of street hiphoppers called Saigon Fresh.
Samsung, which gets a generous share of product placement here, is hosting a dance off against the team’s mortal rivals, the North Killaz. The only spontaneous moves in Saigon Electric are the ones the dancers perform.
Bi, Don’t Be Afraid!, set in the outskirts of Hanoi, offers a different worldview and rhythm. It’s all lyricism and little plot: director Phan Dang Di, who scripted the adult drama Choi Voi (Adrift), takes advantage of the lifting of censorship in Vietnam to present mature material, with nude scenes, an instance of masturbation and sexual assaults.
Our lens into a troubled household is young Bi (Phan Thanh Minh). His own carefreeness is disturbed by the arrival of a grandfather (Tien Tran) who has spent most of his life overseas on national business. The old man is mortally ill and not quite aware of the general dysfunction going on around him.
Father Quang (Nguyen Ha Phong) is drinking himself into oblivion every night and hanging around a massage parlor. The unmarried aunt, a substitute schoolteacher who lives with them, has an interesting sex life. She’s involved with a roughneck construction worker, but she has her eye on a student she met on the bus.
Bi’s heaven and hell—and his playground—is the local ice factory, a steaming, muddy place that produces a precious cargo. Ice is something wondrous in a place as tropical as Vietnam. It’s something that connects everyone on their solitary wanderings: it unites the grandfather’s diseased body, the aunt’s burning sex organ, the swamp cooler at the beer cafe where Quang is drinking away his nights.
The margins of Bi’s world are a river wasteland, where he goes to search for flowers amid the weeds. There, young men have their own muddy world of pleasure, playing soccer in the rain.
Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! has its own performance of hiphop-inflected music. But when you hear it, you’re hearing something that’s specifically Vietnamese in the scales and harmonies, as opposed to the more bland international style of Saigon Electric.
Bi, Don’t Be Afraid! is a bewildering film, and I can’t pretend to have gotten every inflection or every reference to Vietnamese life and lore. Moreover, it seems to have been cut in a way to make the narrative more ambiguous. Yet, compared to the commercial slickness of Saigon Electric, Bi’s refusal to explain itself thoroughly is risky and admirable.
