Bi, dung so!

I feel so proud when I watched this movie: new Vietnamese cinema triumphs. Since the 1st movie we made, Vietnamese film industry has been heavily restricted in sexual scenes. This movie broke that rule, brought to the audience a new perspective, a new life, a new approach. It seems so fresh and so sensational. Sadly, not many of my Vietnamese friends like this Phan Dang Di's film. They criticise it because it seems to them like porn. But I really know that they haven't used their imagination while they watch this master piece. This is a story about Bi's household. He has a broken family. His father never spends time with his family. His mother depressingly tries to gain affection and love from the husband through her care, but she fails. His aunt loves one of her student but has sex with another man. And his grandfather has become seriously sick after his endless journeys and is waiting for the dearth to take him. The connection between these people is just like cold ice in the ice factory. No love, no warm, no care ness. And Phan Dang Di has done a very good job describing it in his very own style. He has sent a message: "take a look around you, people. Are you making an ice wall separating you from your family, close friend, or even your love?" As I said above, a little bit of imagination is what you need. Many metaphors have been used, and they are all very beautiful. The most obvious one is the ice cube. Bi put a leaf and an apple into some ice cubes, they are red, and they represent the dreams, love, attention… But they are covered by ice; the ice plays the role of the ignorance, selfishness, anxiety, burdens… It's like a person get stuck in a glass house, he can see everything outside but no one care, no one comes to rescue him from the trap of life.

Another good metaphor is the search for some leafs. Bi wants to exchange a red leaf with his grandfather, so he keeps on looking for a new leaf as the return. The search of Bi also is the search for happiness of everyone else, just in different way. His dad looks for a new a way out by seeking sex with some poor girls. His mother wants love from her husband by doing house work, cooking, and cleaning for her father in law. His aunt falls for her student but accepts another man to satisfy her sexual desire. Bi never finds the leaf because his granddad died after a while. And the family remains broken as other characters never reach their cheerfulness. The search of everyone in the family shakes it to the core. And in the end they all know that they never can be the same again.

I love this film's colour, I love the lively sound, I love the over-lapping culture in Hanoi as it is moving from tradition to modern society. Everything seems as real as a wind which comes and sweep over you.

Sexual scenes were beautifully filmed. The almost back-and-white theme after the couple making love was impressively stunning. Somehow the cameraman and editor has put in that scenes the abusiveness of the husband, the unreal happiness from the wife, and the wall between them. They make love but don't love each other. Kieu Trinh has a gorgeous body, and she expresses her loneliness very well.

Other characters finished their role fully too.

The approach of "Bi, don't be afraid" is very westernised. There is no main actor or actress, but they all connect in a painful way. Very impressive, indeed.

I highly recommend this film to everyone interest in foreign films.

In an old house in Hanoi, several generations of a Vietnamese family live. There is the grandfather who has returned from abroad, the unmarried sister yearning to find a husband and lusting after one of her high school students, the young boy who likes to wander through nearby fields. The idea that behind the order of a family structure lie a lot of frustrations (sexual and otherwise) and unbridled passions is common to many movies (from the West or from Asia). Some of it reminds me of the early films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming Liang (though the movie is nowhere as scabrous). The movie has some sexual scenes, which are reportedly unusual in Vietnamese films. It includes some nifty shots of busy, hustling Hanoi. In the end, the movie is interesting but a bit undeveloped. Though the movie is unquestionably artistically ambitious, it not always delivers.

2.5 out of 5 stars

The difficulty (or comfort) with reviewing a film from your native country is that your own knowledge and familiarity might lead to a certain degree of bias. Bi is not the first ground-breaking Vietnamese film, certainly, but the word "ambitious" does not seem to be ill-fitting here (Look, Dang Di just participates in the Sight and Sound Director Poll, barely with this debut! What do you think?)

Which is not to say that the film is good enough. Bi seems to look at the Vietnamese family and individuals through a perverted glass. The casting of actors from north to south gives the film the license to extend its comment on the incestuous nature of familial relationships, or the excessiveness of modernity, or the very basic, run-of-the-mill desires of the educated class, to a near universal level, at least within the country. If this symbol of a family represents the way that Vietnamese society currently works, we do not need to look further into the government or the business for a source of corruption.

However, the director cunningly defended his ideas. In one kitchen scene, he suggested that the source of the patriarchal pattern of the family unit in Vietnam is rooted in the Confucian nature of national ideology (which, in his opinion, is never removed during the Socialist period). The uninformed audiences might be easily taken in by his thesis, but those who have at least some basic knowledge about the contemporary history of the country know that this is not entirely true. If anything, the Socialist period provides some level of power to Vietnamese women. If Bi is set in a rural area, Dang Di's ideas about female imprisonment might have worked, but are we supposed to believe that a family at the center of Hanoi still functions in this way? Something like "Season of the Falling Leaves" (Mùa Lá Rụng, a fairly popular TV series in Vietnam) is a much more honest portrait of a broken Vietnamese family on the brink of modernization.

What brings the film further away from reality is the lack of real motivation behind the characters. The mother (played by Kieu Trinh) is beyond submissive, but there is no clue to why she is so. Her husband's (Hai Phong) family never does anything to suppress her, or force her into submission. The fact that she is from Saigon makes it even less believable that she enslaves herself in that manner. There is no back story (for example, her family background, her level of education, etc.) to explain her behavior so as to make her character more convincing. The only explanation that seems to work here is that she is enslaving herself out of love for her husband. Yet, there is no chemistry between the two of them to begin with (except for a dirty, labored sex scene that exemplifies the tone of the entire film). We are left to wonder: why did the two of them even fall in love and marry at the first place? That the wife subjects herself to so much endurance seems more like an plot device to beg for our sympathy, rather than an attempt to explore a recognizable human tragedy. The aunt's (Thuy Hoa) story is actually the better sub-plot here. Her dirty desire (to have sex) with one of her hunky students speaks to her fragility as a woman as well as her pure feeling of boredom with the world around her. Yet, her characterization is so weak, just like other characters in the movie, that at times, she is reduced to a plain "horny" creature, acting out of instincts, without any sense of rationality. So many things in this film are presented purely for shock effects, rather than anything more meaningful. The scene when Kieu Trinh's character embraces her father-in-law in bed after falling to sleep best exemplifies this trend in the film. The shot seems to have less to say about the incestuous tendencies as part of human nature or the rigorous, oppressive familial rule in Vietnam, than the grip that Dang Di's arrogant directional style has on the audiences.

If you want to do a movie that broadly comments on society and family like this one, you have to possess a sense of wisdom and acuity. Look at Edward Yang's Yi Yi, for example. The late director's masterpiece also reveals the hidden desires as well as the materialistic tendencies of an extended family in Taiwan, but his sense of humanism means that we are able to sympathize for the characters. He looks at every issue from a balanced perspective. Dang Di is ambitious, but he is bull-horned, immature in his social philosophizing (if he ever attempts to do so). He simply lacks the emotional hindsight to make a great film. His characters are so one-dimensional, his story construction so futile that I am not sure whether there is anything meaningful to gain from Bi. At the end, the film screams the two words "misogynistic" and "misanthropic" – maybe too loud – but there is no hint what the film is decrying exactly. Or maybe it is attacking everything at the same time: tradition, modernity, materialism, familial ties... In short, nothing seems to escape its offensive pretension (apparent in the film's sexual overdose) to being something higher than itself. We are not Bi, but we are, perhaps, no less frightened.

If the object of this film was to introduce a bunch of themes and not develop any of them, then it was a success. There are so many loose threads that one could give almost any interpretation as to the feelings, motives, actions, etc. of the characters.

I like the title which contributes to the mystery of the film. I cannot fathom how the title relates to the film at all - except there is a character by the name of Bi. After sitting through to the end, I am left with why, why, and more whys. The biggest why is why I held out to the very end - actually, I thought there might be some resolution or the tying up of a few threads. The ending brought another why to me. It seemed to me with the way the story progressed, the logic of the ending as it was - did not complete a story. It could have easily continued or ended at any number of earlier junctures.

Knowing the language and culture could possibly contribute to a better enjoyment of this film, but you would have a hard time convincing me of that.