Boat People

Chris 🍉

yeah fuck every single thing about this stupid ass movie, and ann hui is a sack of shit for making it. to use post-war vietnam as your setting but making it your goal to be "apolitical" is already misguided at best, but its truly almost laughable how it plays out (before i got too exhausted from it all and turned it off about an hour in). focusing on the suffering of poverty stricken vietnamese people in the south while shying away from any politcs whatsoever (except, of course, to criticize vietnamese establishment in a vacuum) ends up portraying every single vietnamese character as either a helpless victim of incalculable suffering or an evil commie who solves every problem with violence and gunfire. france's colonialism is never touched upon except for all the characters' weird fixation on french cuisine and wine--while the poor vietnamese markets peddle monkey brains and plain rice noodles because why not compound on your notion of them as primitive and, again, helpless outside of foreign intervention--and american involvement is only brought up in some weird scene where an older vietnamese man wears a GI's boots around his neck as some kind of punchline. this movie is not made with vietnamese people in mind, instead using them as pawns for propaganda purposes or victims to be ogled at, so i dont believe ann hui's explanation that it's supposed to be a portayal of their humanism and suffering for one second. and of course this isnt even getting into the politics outside of the actual text, from using a japanese photographer as a self-insert for hui (hello japanese occupation of vietnam/"indochina"?) to it being made from the perspective of a hong kong director who also filmed in china—in Cantonese with a fully HK/Chinese cast of course—with permission of its government. The latter also making it all feel so artificial I’m amazed people are actually able to connect with this on any level. And clearly it works given the rating on here and the criterion release and it apparently being one of Hui’s favorites from her output. But again… it’s just not made with people like me in mind. It begs the question… why this narrative? Why this setting? Why is this the third movie Ann hui made about vietnam?perhaps what makes me the most angry is thinking about how criterion's release of this will expose so many ignorant people to it who will then come out of this thinking they learned something profound about vietnam just because it isn't an american narrative. unbelievably awful

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine4.0

ACTION! - FEMALE 4FRONT: THE HUI'S PERSPECTIVEHui once again proves she can be a very eclectic filmmaker with a film that honestly was the type of movie I thought she would do when I saw that picture of her while searching for a director to do a marathon on.Tender, quiet, human (though I know at least one person in LB that may disagree with me) with some incredible, moving and nuanced performances. Season Ma alone gets to convey so much through only her stare, which at first appears to be just the same deadpan look, but I don’t know, I get to feel so much of her emotions through them. Also, these still moments make some of the most tense scenes even more effective and hard-hitting, such as that massacre in the boat or the quick suicide. Story-wise, it serves as the end of Hui’s “Vietnam trilogy,” and you can trace back a few similarities to the first installment (can’t say about the second as I couldn’t find it), especially this romance set against the background of this dream of archiving a better life, now in the midst of the communist takeover following the Fall of Saigon. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that despite George Lam’s cheerful and positive attitude, a lot of the film breathes this sense of desperation and melancholy heightened by the score. Also, absolutely the most stunningly shot film I’ve seen from Hui at this point. It also helps that this was a CC remaster rather than a VHS rip and everything looks pristine. The lighting work is fantastic. The camerawork with some great use of close-ups is also an added bonus and an open mirror into the soul of many of these characters. Also, the scale feels wider.All in all, a far cry from the loud and wild films we’ve seen from Hui to this point, leaning into the laidback, almost docudrama territory the likes of Edward Yang made a name for.ACTION! - FEMALE 4FRONT: THE HUI'S PERSPECTIVETODAY SCHEDULESilvina Ocampo: las dependenciasBed and BreakfastHumpty SharmaTo Kill A PriestBoat People

Filipe Furtado4.0

Ann Hui's horror movie look into post war Vietnam. It has Hui's usual empathy, but is far moodier than its realist reputation might suggest. One of the film's key concepts is turning Lam's Japanese photographer into a blank, a vessel for images, but someone whose journey is complete secondary in relation to what he sees.