The Lover/L’Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung cu and Bargirls/Gái nhay
Tess Do
1 and Carrie Tarr
2
1 School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
2 School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University, London, UK
KEYWORDS
Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City • Vietnamese cinema • Đổi mới (Renovation) • cinematic city • globalization • nostalgia
This article addresses representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in four films made since Đổi mới, the opening up of Vietnam to western influences, initiated in 1986.
The Lover/L’Amant (1992) is a Franco-British heritage film which reconstructs the city from a Eurocentric neocolonial perspective, while
Cyclo/Xích lô (1995), a French-funded film made by a France-based Vietnamese filmmaker, is a contemporary poetic thriller which treats the city expressively as the site of present-day corruption and violence. The nostalgia evident in these two ‘outsider’ films is contrasted with the more complex views of the city in two state-funded low-budget ‘insider’ films by local Vietnamese filmmakers,
Collective Flat/Chung cu (1999) and
Bargirls/Gái nhay (2003); the first, an intellectual fable set in the decade or so following reunification/Independence in 1975 which recalls an attempt at collective living, the second, a hugely popular treatment of contemporary urban realities, both corrupt and progressive. Examining how the mise-en-scène and narratives of the city differ from film to film, the essay takes the representation of the city through changing historical, political, social and economic times, from colonial-orientalist Saigon to corrupt, capitalist Ho Chi Minh City via the slow degeneration of the postwar socialist/collectivist experiment. In so doing, it confirms the importance of the films’ moments and contexts of production in the construction of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City as a cinematic ‘city-text’.
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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:
Published Online: 13 Mar 2008
Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
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