Taboo in Vietnamese Movies

[Thanh Dang Nguyen <Nguyen.Dang.Thanh@Eng.Auburn.EDU>]

Dear Hai and other friends,

> If you want to be reminded of your experience in VN, how about watching 
> some of the new Chinese movies, such as "Farewell, my concubine", "Blue 
> Kite", "To Live", etc? 

Are they any good? For some reason, I always feel reluctant in
approaching Asian movies in general, and Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kong
movies in particular. Probably because I have never seen a really 
memorable one. I watched the well-praised "The Last Emperor" last year 
(well, it's directed by Bertolucci with a Chinese cast), but didn't like
it much (Joan Chen looks good, though :) I guess I should check them out
after my finals.

I think Asian people love to watch those movies where the good should
overcome the bad, where heroes and villains can always be seen,
and probably those with a happy, satisfying end. I don't die for
these movies, unfortunately. It's not about life, since "life is going
on without turning into stories". I want to feel the life,
to see it the way I can never see otherwise, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, please don't call me pretentious!

> If you don't know them, just ask your advisor or some professors 
> who look young and "hip" at your department.

None of my professors looks hip :) BTW, in a tiny place where I'm
living now, I'm pretty much sure that it's impossible to get hold
of any of these movies. But I'm still doing my best to watch them!
Here we have weekly on-campus free movies, but they're not my type,
unfortunately. When I visited Va(n last year in Yale, I was
quite surprised to see that they show lots of good movies for
students. I think it is this kind of alternative club that can
introduce young students to some new and fresh experience.

> But I remember there was a shower scene in "Vu. a'n vie^n dda.n 
> la.c", in which the main girl character entered the shower, took off
> her T-shirt, and ... cut.

That's the cut! So it doesn't count :) Well I think the first such a
movie that suffered harsh criticism was "Co gai tren song" made in
'88 (??), just before I left Vietnam. I saw this movie just about a
week after arriving in Budapest. They showed it during an annual
celebration of the independence day (Quoc khanh 2/9) in a big culture
center. Anyway we're pretty much excited to see it, having read all the 
big-voice criticisms back in Vietnam. But as far as I can remember, 
nothing *really* happened in it. Maybe because we saw the censored 
version with all the sex scenes being cut? Remember that I saw it before
watching those "three-star" movies in Budapest movie theaters, so I was 
pretty much innocent then. Well let's say I was disappointed a little 
bit after the movie, since we had to travel by tram and bus all the way
from our dormitory to the banquet -- as they put it, much ado about
nothing :) As a final word, I think that nudity, or eroticism is still a 
big head-ache for Vietnamse filmmakers to handle it delicately, since it's
deeply originated in Western cultures. Needless to say, even now, more
than ten years after reform, our government still seems to be very
careful to open the door for this kind of cultural exchange.

Cheers,

-Thanh