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“[Foreign influence] is good for
Vietnamese cinema,” affirms Quang
Dung. “It encourages Vietnamese
filmmakers to improve themselves to
do better. When the Viet Kieu movie
wave came to Vietnam, their technical
level was much higher than the movies
here, but their weakness was that their
movies, stories, and characters were
not very local. Recently Vietnamese
filmmakers have tried to improve a lot
on their technical side, and at the same
time the VK directors have tried to
localize themselves so that their movies
can touch audiences here. Vietnamese
filmmakers want to make movies that
can go beyond the border and find
audiences outside of Vietnam, but VK
filmmakers want to make movies for
local audiences. So I think that both
sides have to work together to develop
Vietnamese cinema.”
“I also think that foreign influences
affect Vietnamese audiences, who are
changing too,” he continues. “It used to
be that they only cared about the story
and the actors—they didn’t really mind if
the sound and the color weren’t so good.
Now they’ve been seeing movies from
all over the world, so you can’t make a
movie with bad sound and bad images
any more.”
This being said, Quang Dung is
also keen to distance his creative work
from the Korean original. “The film
was chosen to be remade in Vietnam
because the production company felt
there are similarities between Korea
and Vietnam—for example, the role
of women in society, or in historical
terms, the wars that separated the two
parts of the country. But of course there
are differences. I think that compared
to the Vietnamese, Korean people are
more extreme. I feel Vietnamese people
are more emotional; we find it easier
to forget the past and work toward
the future. So there is a psychological
difference between the cultures.”
“I’ve heard from many people that
they find the remake is lighter than the
Korean original,” adds Quynh Ha, “more
upbeat.”
Double Ensemble
The story revolves around Hong
Anh’s character Hieu Phuong, whose
chance encounter with a long-lost friend
(a terminally ill cancer patient at a local
hospital) prompts her to seek out other
figures from their shared childhood in
Dalat. The plot shifts between 2000-
era Saigon and the Dalat of the early
70s, with a different troupe of actresses
playing the six women in each age—
allowing Thang Nam Ruc Ro to feature
a core cast of mature film talent while
simultaneously building a story that
introduces promising new faces.
The mirror ensemble cast format
naturally involves a broader and more
nuanced storytelling element than is
usual in this genre, but this also makes
for a more challenging and potentially
frustrating cinema experience—a
dangerous gambit for a commercial
feature. In the case of this film,
something in the chemistry seems to
be resonating very well with audiences,
so much so that the immediate success
of the film has come somewhat as a
surprise.
“I really loved the original,” admits
Quang Dung, “but I was also afraid that
it wasn’t going to be a very successful
commercial movie here because of
the multiple storylines. I think that
there was a similar situation when the
original movie came out—when they
saw the first cut, the producer and
production team were afraid that the
movie would not be as commercially
successful as they hoped. When it did
come out though, it was a big success
in Korea because the original story is
really something that people can relate
to, and they can find themselves in this
movie. Of course it’s a very femaleoriented
film, but the strange thing is
20 04/2018