When I touch down in a country I’m visiting for the first time, I enter an ultra-focused state in which my senses are heightened, my eyes magnifying glasses alert to the merest detail. This hyper-perceptive, emotionally over-charged condition is so ridiculously intense that it inevitably lasts only an hour, a few hours, a day at most. Any longer and spontaneous combustion would surely follow. (Maybe it’s the same for everyone, but I can’t know that. I can only speak my truth. Take that as a caution that applies to the series of posts on Vietnam that follows.)

The taxi ride from the airport to our hotel in Saigon was truly unforgettable. It was about 8pm on a Tuesday. The driver spoke zero English. Free of the distraction of obligatory small-talk, I sat in the front passenger seat in my super-sponge mode and absorbed my new surroundings. The windows were wound down, presumably because the aircon wasn’t working. The air was thick and warm, tropical, as expected – and as it turned out, this was about the only expectation that was not to be confounded in the 3 weeks that followed.

Shortly into our taxi journey I became aware of a hum. A few motorbikes came into view. The hum was building, as if we were entering a beehive. More bikes, more and more. Then we were in the middle of it: a maelstrom of buzzing Hondas, not bees! Hundreds of ‘em. Thousands! Helmets everywhere, riding the chorus of engines this way, that way, every bloody way. The taxi was tailgating (no choice there!), motorcycle riders wove in and out and around us, one guy crossed in front of us with his arm out fending off our car, as if bodysurfing across the face of a wave. The driver plugged on impassively, tooting his way through the singles, couples, families and kids atop bikes.

It was overwhelmingly impressive. Pulsing with life. The traffic flowing impossibly through the apparent chaos. So this was Saigon.

THIS WAS SAIGON.

I was all over the place emotionally. In fact, I felt as if I was going to blubber. What the hell?

I had no idea I would react as I did, but I knew that Vietnam was not just another SE Asian country for me. This is undoubtedly the same for anyone in Australia who was approaching conscription age at the time of the Vietnam War – ‘the American War’, as it’s known in Vietnam. Although most of us knew little about Vietnam or its people back then, Australian involvement in that war left no one untouched. We were a country divided, stirred as never before or since.

In my youthful simplicity I saw it as all very black and white. Either you were on our side, or you were the enemy. ‘Our side’ comprised not just the folk who were against the war and outraged at the Liberal government’s “All the way with LBJ” declaration that committed young Australians to maim and be maimed, to kill and die, to suffer and commit atrocities in Vietnam as part of the American offensive against the Viet Cong/China/Russia/Communism.

No, ‘our side’ was the glorious counter culture, the social and cultural freedom fighters who were delivering a new world of enlightened values. ‘Our side’ was rocknroll, the new music that had set the walls of the city a-quake. Was drugs to open the doors of perception. Was sex to liberate a million pimply virgins from the chains of churchy upbringings and the repressions of our parents. New beginnings. New system. The Promised Land, no less. An illusory one, as it transpired, but who could know that then?

And the enemy? Straights, cops, soldiers, the Liberal Party and their voters, and worst of all ANYONE who believed in the Vietnam War. Parents, brothers and sisters most certainly included.

There is so much more to say on this, but this is a blog about my recent experience as a first-time traveller to Vietnam, and I am well aware that the concentration span of online readers is very short (mine included), so I’ll resist the urge to elaborate. If you were there, there’s no need, and if you weren’t, you’ll probably have little interest in my reflections here.

Jump cut. Gough won the election and pulled us out of Vietnam, and so ended the Moratorium marches and protests. Life became a little less meaningful, as a generation of banner-waving protesters settled down to uni studies, jobs and procreating, in many cases eventually selling out all they had once held precious – and in just about all cases, blissfully ignorant of the suffering and privations the end of the war was to bring to the people of the south as Ho Chi Minh’s regime set about exacting revenge on those who had opposed them.

For me, and I suspect many others, the very word ‘Vietnam’ continued to resonate with the excitement of communal action, of rebellion channelled into a just cause, of the romance of insurrection, of genuine shared outrage against the hopelessly – nay, criminally – misguided and pigheaded authorities of the day. And of sweet, final victory against the bastards.

How shallow all that must sound – is! – to those whom the Vietnam war touched more personally. The familes and loved ones of the soldiers who fought over there and never came back, and those who came back mangled, or worse. Who returned to Australian shores to be jeered and spat on, treated as pariahs, as murderers, rather than servicemen who had done their country’s bidding in a dirty war, sometimes at great individual cost. I had no sympathy for them at the time. I know better now.

Then there were the Vietnamese boat people who had supported the south who fled to our country to escape recrimination at the hands of the new Vietnamese government. They came in their thousands, and were welcomed. We knew we owed them something. The least we could do was give them sanctuary, and a new home. There was none of the parsimony or paranoia of today towards sea-borne refugees. And they repaid us tenfold, these industrious newcomers from Asia, changing the face of white Australia forever. Thank Christ that White Australia shame is behind us.

I, like many, regard the Vietnamese as amongst our best immigrants. And there is a sense – and I don’t think this is mine alone – of a special relationship between Australia and Vietnam.

These thoughts and many more accompanied me in the taxi as we made our way to District 1 (where most budget travellers stay). I surveyed glaze-eyed the helmeted hundreds swarming around me, and felt a wave of admiration, and of something akin to gratitude and relief that they had transcended the past, left the war far behind so that there was no trace of it. They had won. Right had prevailed. Their country was their own at long, long last. And who could deny that they were thriving? Just look at this place.

Vietnam – that emotive word that evoked so much – was now more than a word. All these years later, the site of the cursed War that had split the Western world yet united its youth in a way that is unimaginable now, was becoming real for me. No longer a word. A country.

The irresistible energy and thrilling chaos of the city, the noise, the visual assault overtook me and by the time we arrived at our hotel, I was left with only one emotion – excitement at whatever the night, the next day, the coming 3 weeks held in store. I couldn’t have dreamed that I would soon look back on myself and my romantic, emotion-driven inner rave as I sailed into the motorbike fray in that taxi as naive and facile in the extreme.

Movie Reviews

‘Another Year’ – Movie Review

February 8, 2011 rolanstein Leave a comment

I loved Mike Leigh’s early movie, High Hopes, but he lost me with a subsequent succession of dreary, depressing films mired in the misery of working class Brits, and driven by a leftist political agenda I could identify with, but found tedious. At some point I gave up on him.

That may have been a mistake. I don’t know what his recent movies have been like, having studiously avoided them, but Another Year is superb.

Leigh appears to have moved on from his ideologically driven cinema, and this has freed him to unshackle his characters, to let them find their voices and talk for themselves, rather than as pawns subservient to the designs of a larger political game. The characters are the game in Another Year, and the context is everyday life.

The two leads, Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), are middle-aged, middle-class folk with good careers. Yes! Not council tenement dwellers, not petty crims, not junkies or drunks, not doomed and demeaned…

The reflex reaction of hardcore Mike Leigh fans might be to yawn theatrically and indulge in some smug self-talk affirming their enduring leftist/bohemian leanings and decrying their man as selling out. However, if – like me – you’re way past that sort of painful posturing (painful and usually hypocritical and pretentious), read on.

Tom and Gerri are reasonably content with their outwardly modest lot. They have their comfortable home, and still in relatively good physical shape in the autumn of their lives have learned to accept the small pleasures – tending their vege garden in the local allotment, cooking and appreciating good food (and beverages), family, friends. It so happens that many of Tom and Gerri’s friends are lost souls whom they are (mostly) happy to welcome into the stability and warmth of their home.

Gerri’s work colleague, Mary (Lesley Manville), is the most lost of all. Self-centred, in denial about her drinking problem and many other aspects of her life that are dragging her down, pathetically she holds a torch for Tom and Gerri’s much younger son, Ronnie, who is not remotely interested but does his best to humour her, thus keeping her at arm’s length in the kindest manner he can devise. It is quite a feat to remain kind to Mary, for she is so bloody irritating.

It is indicative of Leigh’s move away from leftist proselytizer that Mary is not presented as the victim of an oppressive British caste system. Rather, she is infuriatingly incapable of making decisions to help herself. Responsibility has shifted from the State and its power-mongers to the individual.

However, Leigh is making no judgments here. His purpose is to plumb the depths of his characters and to have them reveal themselves in their complexities and contradictions. As the layers peel back, so profound is the desperate loneliness at Mary’s core (and so brilliant Manville’s portrayal) that she ends up evoking great sympathy and compassion and stealing the film, particularly in the final poignant moments. If you’re not moved speechless by the time the credits begin to roll, get yourself on the waiting list for a heart transplant.

Manville’s performance is truly out of the box, but she’s not the only standout. Jim Broadbent is charismatic as the gentle, wryly humorous Tom, and Ruth Sheen is hugely believable as Gerri. In fact, all the performances are top notch. Inspirational, even.

This is slice-of-life drama at its very best. Leigh’s improvisational rehearsal method of extracting natural dialogue from his performers has always worked well, but never so well as here. None of the actors seem to be acting at all. The contrast between these wonderfully natural performances and the American version of this sort of cinematic realism (a la the vastly overrated Blue Valentine, for example) is stark. The yanks seem to equate ‘natural’ with self-consciously averted gazes, mumbling, stuttering, and talking over the top of each other (someone exorcise James Dean, please!). There’s nothing so affected in Another Year.

Although the actors appear to be extemporising, this is a shrewdly-managed illusion. Leigh knows exactly where he’s heading every frame of the way. Beautifully paced and shot, this is the work of a major filmmaker at his peak who has the confidence to trust in his actors and crew, and the courage and wisdom to believe in and surrender to the wonder and power of the collaborative process.

Warming, heartbreaking, tragic, comic, life-affirming and above all imbued with a great sense of humanity, Another Year is a must-see. The year is yet young, but I doubt it has a better film in store than this.

For other Boomtown Rap movie reviews, see Movie Review Archives

Movie Reviews

‘The Fighter’ – Movie Review

February 1, 2011 rolanstein Leave a comment

One of the problems with boxing movies is that they tend to be formulaic and predictable. Poor boy sees boxing as his one shot at ‘success’, trains hard, gets smacked around in the ring and outside it, fights against and overcomes personal demons, more hard training for the Big Bout against some evil mutha of an opponent, and we all know what happens next.

I was hoping The Fighter might be a cut above. It’s based on the true story of professional boxer “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his older half-brother trainer Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale). Real life pays no heed to dramatic form, so you’d think there was a fair chance that this film might at least shake loose of the formulaic. Well, it gives a bit of a wriggle from time to time, but without quite managing to break free.

That doesn’t necessarily damn it as a movie, of course. Many an unremarkable story has been saved by terrific characters given the treatment by accomplished performers, and there is one standout here: Christian Bale’s Dicky (grow up youse gigglers at the back).

Dicky is a retired boxer whose dubious claim to fame is having knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard (whom many claim merely tripped). Now addicted to crack cocaine, he is notoriously unreliable as Micky’s trainer and not intrinsically very interesting as a character, but Bale conjures up an alchemical combination of manic desperation, bad-boy-with-a-heart charm and will to survive that endows him with an undeniable charisma. Unfortunately, Wahlberg and the other actors pale before Bale’s incandescence. Not their faults – their characters just don’t measure up. This is especially unfortunate for Wahlberg, since his is the lead role.

Micky’s family recall those ‘Walmart people’ pics that are constantly doing the email rounds. This mob are as rough as guts, bog Irish-Americans that are so trashy they’re cartoonish – especially his seven adult sisters, who all still live at home with mom, tyrannical matriarch Alice (Melissa Leo). Naturally, dad (Jack McGee) is emasculated by his ballbreaker wife, and the only member of the family who has half a clue…if only anyone listened to him. Mickey’s boxing career is hampered by his family’s interference and insistence that bro Dicky is the man to train him. When new girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) arrives on the scene, she challenges mom’s authority and becomes Public Enemy Number One for the family. For Mickey, she represents an chance to snap the umbilical cord and make his own way.

Got the picture? Frankly, I’m sick of this dysfunctional family stuff. It’s been done to death. And this setup is too trite, too predictable. Psychology by numbers, in fact.

With a few deviations along the way (thank the lawd), the narrative moves inexorably towards the big fight finale that is de rigeur for the genre. Cinematically, it’s brilliantly done, and while inevitably over the top, is more realistic than most Hollywood boxing bouts. Quite stirring, and for me, the best part of the flick.

The rest, though, I found a bit of a yawn, and sorta pointless. ‘True’ stories do not necessarily translate into great films. Beats me how it’s been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Then again, so was that pile of caca Slumdog Millionaire – and worse still, it got the gong. They had it right for a change last year with The Hurt Locker, but two years in succession? Maybe the odds are not looking too bad for The Fighter…

For other Boomtown Rap movie reviews, see Movie Review Archives

The Boomtown Rap

Travels in Vietnam 2011: Intro

‘Another Year’ – Movie Review

‘The Fighter’ – Movie Review

movie reviews + occasional other musings