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Seeing Double: The Films of R. Hong-an Truong

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pmc.2007.0008

1053-1920

Viet Thanh Nguyen,

Cambodian History and Society

Seeing Double: The Films of Hong-An Truong Viet Thanh Nguyen For those whose image of Viet Nam comes only from the reel projected by Hollywood, the version of that country that appears in Hong-An Truong’s films may seem alien territory. Truong’s colonial-era Viet Nam didn’t exist by that name, but was partitioned by the French into Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, which, along with Cambodia and Laos, composed Indochina. The colonial past she explores so delicately is truly a distant colony, far removed both from the sweatshop that is the country’s semi-capitalist present and from the brothel it was in the American era. One way for us to measure the difference between the later American style of domination and the earlier French one is with our eyes, for if the American military swaggered memorably through Southeast Asia in olive-green fatigues, French colonizers possessed a far more romantic sense of style. As part of their dowry to the Vietnamese, the French left behind not only fine coffee and crusty bread, but also cinema-worthy architecture and white colonial suits. While those effete trappings are no match for the strong-arm seductions of an American like Colonel Sanders—the only man left in Ho Chi Minh City still wearing a white suit today—they provide the French, and the world, with the sepia-toned illusions of a more civilized period of rule. Truong’s films quietly but persistently demand that we look twice at these illusions. For her, as for Viet Nam, the crucial year is 1954, close enough to the line dividing the century between its black-and-white half and its second half in color. After the visual and stereophonic blitzkrieg of the United States’ “Vietnam War,” the period of French colonialism with its black-and-white artifacts and scratchy 78-rpm recordings of Edith Piaf felt like it belonged to a different century. Far removed from our present or the recent past of the American war, French colonialism is an age that was not recorded in color, and hence is one that we see differently, remember differently, feel differently. Filmed in black-and-white, the French artillery barrages seen in “Explosions in the Sky” seem like only so much archaic sound and fury. In fact during this battle of Dien Bien Phu nearly 10,000 Viet Minh soldiers died, along with some 1,500 of the French forces (Duiker 455). Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” might have beeen an obvious selection for the soundtrack, at least from the perspective of someone who was not Vietnamese, but Truong’s choice also makes us hear the event differently, for the bilingual South Vietnamese version of “Sounds of Silence” that rocks the film is notably anachronistic. Based on the Simon and Garfunkel hit of 1966, this song earmarks these scenes as edited from a southern Vietnamese point of view, one that only comes into being because of Dien Bien Phu. The defining—and dividing—event of 1954, the catastrophic defeat of the French by Viet Minh forces at Dien Bien Phu, would lead to the cleavage of Viet Nam into North and South. Truong subtly insists on seeing, and hearing, from the southern perspective through both of her films because this perspective is long neglected in the west, where French and Americans have paid more attention, and respect, to Northern Vietnamese or Communist perspectives on the Indochina wars. In postwar exile, South Vietnamese refugees discovered that they lost not only their country but their history, too, which was dismembered both by their Communist enemies and by their western hosts. One way these refugees managed to survive was by resorting to the tried and true method of losers everywhere: singing and listening to western-style pop tunes and soft rock ballads about longing and heartbreak, a genre epitomized in the diaspora by songs like “I’d Love You to Want Me” by Lobo and the bilingual cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang,” heard in Nguyen Tan Hoang’s video, “Forever Linda!” Southern Vietnamese refugees carried those songs with them as the aural equivalent of the shirts on their backs, so that for...