Comprehending the Vietnam War in Film

For those who like their Vietnam films in Technicolor and Dolby stereo, Karma would probably be a disappointment. But this stark, simple - and black and white - venture has other things to commend it, beginning with the fact that it is a Vietnam film made by and about the Vietnamese. Directed by Ho Quang Minh, an overseas Vietnamese based in Switzerland, Karma was in fact the first independent production undertaken in Vietnam since 1975, and, in marked contrast to official Vietnamese cinema and Hollywood alike, it focuses on what Minh described as 'the only real losers of the conflict - the South Vietnamese Republications.'

The story, told in flashback, traces the war's human toll, not in terms of battles and body counts, but through the destruction of a marriage. The husband, Binh (played by Vietnam's most popular actor, Tran Quang), a South Vietnamese soldier, is reported dead; shortly afterwards, his wife, Nga (Phuong Dung), is forced to evacuate her village and resettle in a strategic hamlet outside of Saigon. As it turns out, Binh is still alive, but when he finally makes his way back to Nga, he discovers that she, like thousands of other women in her situation, has become a bar girl in the capital. At this point he gives himself up to the military machinery, joining the Special Forces and participating in the most dangerous operations (as well as the brutal and humiliating rejection of his wife) until he virtually commits suicide by exposing himself to a bombing raid.

The antithesis of an action film, Karma, is a slow, somber evocation of a moment that went on for years. There is no suspense - the film opens with Binh's funeral - and no heroics (also no Americans). Like a tapestry of memories, it is woven with details of daily life and custom, much of which, as Minh himself points out, is bound to escape non-Vietnamese viewers. but the drama of loss, the images of decadence, and the rhythm of despair convey an unmistakable message.

Karma was filmed on location in the south, with camera equipment and materiel inherited from the Americans, and technical advice from former members of the South Vietnamese Special Forces (who also served as stuntmen). The film premiered at the Montreal Film Festival in 1986 and has been making the rounds of other festivals in Europe and Asia. It was also showcased at the Film Forum theater in New York but so far does not have an American distributor. Nor has it been screened publicly in Vietnam, because the original production agreement was limited to foreign distribution, although extensive private screenings have elicited enthusiastic response, and the film has now been cleared for release there as well. Ho Quang Minh spoke with Cineaste Associate Miriam Rosen at the Three Continents Festival in Nantes, France.

Cineaste: Although you were born in Hanoi and grew up on Saigon, you studied engineering in Switzerland and filmmaking in Paris before returning to Vietnam to make Karma. How did that come about?

Ho Quang Minh: I went home in 1981, for the first time in fourteen years, for what was supposed to be just a short visit to see my family. I have a friend there who's a cinematographer, however, and he introduced me to the Vietnamese cinema and other filmmakers, and I wound up staying for a whole year. That's how I found out it would be possible for me to make films in Vietnam as an independent filmmaker.

Cineaste: When you were filming in Vietnam, did you have the feeling of being a foreign director or an overseas Vietnamese director?

Minh: As an overseas Vietnamese, I'm also Vietnamese, but, at the same time, I have a different background. The South Vietnamese cinema - and that's where the people I was working with had their training - was totally commercial, and even if they're making serious films now, maybe too serious, what they're aiming at technically is what they were used to doing before. The actors, for example, don't want to work: they want to sit in the shade and come out when you're nearly ready to shoot. Then they don't know their lines and they don't concentrate, and, if you want to do two or three takes, they get mad. It's not like here, where you do it fifteen times, until it's right. They're also afraid of being filmed without makeup, and sometimes, even when they're playing peasant roles, they want to wear nail polish.

Cineaste: You're obviously still glad to be working there.

Minh: Every time I go back - and I've been there ten times since 1981, or what amounts to about half of my time - it's really good to work in my own language. Even if my French is sometimes better than my Vietnamese, because I know my vocabulary is richer in French, it's  something running in my blood, I think, to speak Vietnamese and to direct in Vietnamese. Its a very strong experience for me. Just like the rest of my generation, I've been marked by the Vietnam conflict and contemporary Vietnamese history so much that I don't think I could do anything else without coming to terms with my memory. There are so many things I'd like to understand, and I'd also like to convey that understanding to other people through filmmaking.

Cineaste: When you say 'other people,' do you make a distinction between Vietnamese and foreigners? Is one more of a priority than the other?

Minh: This is an important point for an artist. I think first of all you have to be authentic, but you also want your work to be seen, so you always try to reach a universal truth. But one of the most powerful ways of reaching the universal is to be authentic. That's the reason why, when you see a film like mine, you sense that it's dedicated or devoted to the Vietnamese, and I think that's true, because I tried above all to make it authentic, to show the reality of Vietnam in it specificity. I didn't want to internationalize the content, to say things in a certain way to make the film more understandable to the Americans or the French. I just made it as I felt it would have been, and, if its good enough, I thin it'll interest everyone. To be honest, I never saw Karma as an isolated film. From the beginning, I decide that I would focus the first stage of my filmmaking career on a few films about Vietnam, to unwind my memories, and I had a program. I wanted to start with this film to focus on the only real losers of the Vietnam conflict, the South Vietnamese Republicans.

Cineaste: Why was that?

Minh: I have a compassion for the weak, the losers, because they're more tragic; there are more dramas, more sacrifices involved.

Cineaste: Do you identify with them? There's a difference between compassion and identifying.

Minh: I wouldn't say that I identify, but I'm very close to them because I lived with them when I was growing up in Saigon. I had a South Vietnamese passport, so I understand them more, I understand their problems more than the North Vietnamese. That was the first priority, and the most powerful sentiment I had about the war, which is what I tried to convey in Karma. From the beginning, I intended to make a second film on the winners, the North Vietnamese. Again, I don't want to talk about heroism, I want to show what kind of sacrifices they had to make in order to endure, to be heroic. That is the point of my next film, which is in preparation now. And the third film will embrace the international point of view, either French or American. If I succeed in making the series, people will get a sense of an entire landscape of moral values and sentiments.

Cineaste: How as the screenplay written?

Minh: I worked from a short story called 'The Wounder Beast' written by Nguy Ngu. I was able to collaborate with the author, who happened to be both a good war correspondent and a good short story writer, and e gave me a lot of help in terms of direct experience of the war, which I didn't have. His story was written in 1969 or 1970, and, to give you and idea of how powerful it was in human terms, it was not only praised in the South Vietnamese press, but it was also published during the war by the Viet Cong and read over Radio Hanoi. When you remember that this was a civil war and people still reacted in that way, it really means something. I'd read a lot of short stories about the conflict, but when I read this one, I decided right away that was it. It was only ten pages long, but I realized right away that the author and I shared the same feelings, the same sentiments of waste and despair, of what to do now. These were remote feelings, not very engaged, just a kind of profound sadness, and that's what I wanted to convey in my film. That's also why the story isn't important to me as a plot but as a means of creating this atmosphere. Of course, this might make it difficult to understand for people who aren't ready to go with it - one criticism I've heard is that it's too long - but what I really wanted was for the audience to feel a bit heavy at the end. I hope at least that they stay until the end - that it's not boring - but at the end they should have a hard time getting up from the seat.

Cineaste: What kinds of considerations went into the style of the film?

Minh: If I can make a parallel with literature, I think there's a common dilemma confronting Third World writers and filmmakers. In the Western cinema, most of the traditional themes have been told and retold, just like in novels, so the difference, the plus, has to come from they way you tell the story, the style. That's the reason why newcomers are at their best when they propose a revolutionary form; sometimes it won't last, but that's the way to get noticed as a new director. If you must have good content, however bold it is, without a new form, you won't make that much of a mark. But in the Third World, there's still a lot to tell, so the content remains very important. When these works of are or literature are brought to Western audiences, they have the added advantage of exoticism: people are less choosy about the form. That's why Latin American novels have been so successful - they're very strong in content, even if they're quite traditional in form. What I'm getting at is that we, as filmmakers from the Third World, also have to think of form. It's not just a meeting of telling a story, but also how to tell it. The problem is that cinema is a Western language. From that point of view, at least, style and form are automatically Westernized. There is also a whole technology involved - it's not like the poet who is happy with a pencil and a blank page.

Cineaste: The role of the woman, and the presence of women in general, is one of the most striking aspects of Karma, and what really keeps it on a human scale. How did you decide on this approach?

Minh: When I was talking with my friends in Vietnam and they'd ask what kind of a film I wanted to make on the war, I'd tell them that I wanted to start with the South Vietnamese Republicans and I really wanted to have female characters, prostitutes and bar girls if possible, because they were really mistreated in the conflict, with all this propaganda about Vietnam as one big whorehouse. It's true that were a lot of prostitutes in Vietnam during the American war, even the Indochina war, but when you think that there were a million South Vietnamese solders and half a million American soldiers, who were really tourists there, it's understandable that you had at least a few hundred thousand prostitutes. I wanted to explain, at least on this level, to show that they were human beings.

Cineaste: Do you think audiences in the U.S. will be able to appreciate your film, especially since Vietnam War films there are getting more and more epic, with more mud, more battles, and more Americans.

Minh: That's a problem with movies in general - the action film has more chance of drawing a large audience. I don't think my film will touch a wide audience, but my hope is that it'll be there for people who are ready to see it. There are a lot of people, especially in the United States, who were really affected by the war and who will be able to get something out of my film because they wanted to understand more about what they experienced.

[This article was originally published in Cineaste, Vol. XVII, No. 2, September 1989, pp. 38-39. Ho Quang Minh's fourth film, Thoi Xa Vang, premiered at the Gothenberg Film Festival in 2005.]