Lovely film sheds light on rural life in Vietnam
Water is everywhere in writer-director Minh Nguyen-Vo's ``Buffalo Boy'' (``Mua Len Trau''), a coming-of-age story that depends as much upon the flooded Vietnamese countryside as the humans who seem to float just above it to reveal its secrets. Based on the classic short story collection ``Scent of the Ca-Mau Forest'' by the celebrated Vietnamese author Son Nam, the film employs the waters that perennially flood the country as ``a mixed metaphor for life and death,'' according to a statement by Nguyen-Vo.
There is plenty of both in ``Buffalo Boy,'' which reveals its beauty in vast, glistening panoramas that should be more evocative on the big screen than in the 2004 DVD version. If you have ever wondered what the life of a Vietnamese peasant was like in the 1940s, it seems unlikely there will be a lovelier evocation of it than ``Buffalo Boy,'' which opens today for a two-week stay at the Camera 12 Cinemas. The director will be on hand for question-and-answer sessions following the evening shows today and Saturday and for the matinees Sunday.
To anyone unfamiliar with life in rural Vietnam during the French colonial period, the opening scenes of ``Buffalo Boy,'' which made the rounds at film festivals in 2004, might seem almost comical, with all the earnest discussions between father and son about the health and well-being of the family's two water buffaloes.
But they're not kidding. Not only do the buffaloes account for most of their livelihood as draught animals in a subsistence economy, it's also easy to see that Kim (Le The Lu) loves them as if they were pets. During Kim's journey, he sleeps on the back of one of the buffaloes, and after talking to him about his plans for the next day, he hugs the animal's giant head.
In this film, buffaloes often get more respect than humans do. Director Nguyen-Vo lingers lovingly on a shot of buffaloes watching the clouds as they graze on the floodplain. In the evening, husbands and wives discuss the beauty of the great buffalo herds they have seen. You never heard such a lot of buffalo talk! But if the specifics of a Vietnamese trail drive differ noticeably from those of their Hollywood western counterparts, the rustlin' and fightin' among frontier varmints appear to be the same everywhere.
Kim's search for grass that his buffaloes can fatten themselves on has brought him to the brink of ruin, when he awakens to find a herd going past. But his offer to indenture himself to the leader of what the herders refer to as their ``gang'' is at first spurned, and the brutality of this world -- in which man and beast sometimes simply are left for dead -- is powerfully evoked. Even strength in numbers doesn't always prove decisive in such a harsh landscape; after Kim is allowed into the gang that had rejected him, his buffaloes go hungry when a rival gang lets its herd devour all the grass on a hill to which Kim had looked for salvation.
Determined to keep his story stripped down, Nguyen-Vo never shows us the French masters who rule these peasants' lives, just the emissaries who come roaring up on a boat in the middle of the trail drive to collect a tax for letting the herd through. The herdsmen dull the pain of the day by smoking a joint around the campfire, but even this brief recreation is interrupted by a murderous monsoon of violence.
Kim eventually goes home disillusioned, and finds himself betrayed even there. Some of the intricacies of the plot -- particularly the dynamics of his relationship with his family -- remain murky to me, but I doubt that an audience more familiar with Vietnamese culture would have any difficulty understanding the subtler nuances of the film.
The boy's passage into manhood is even more tumultuous than his trek across Vietnam's watery plains. He falls in love -- or lust anyway -- with a woman who belongs to someone else, and like everything else in this movie, she comes into his life and goes out of it again in a rush of water.
I'm not sure if the acting is best described as naturalistic, or if Le is even trained in the dramatic arts. He is not, in any case, given to unnecessary theatrics, which seems unlikely to land him the now-vacant lead role in the next ``Mission: Impossible'' picture, but seems just right for the simplicity of this story.
By Bruce Newman - The San Jose Mercury News - September 15, 2006.
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