| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Very good, thoughtful movie about White colonialism and the reasons it cannot work; while also being about its continuation despite its many failings. Like Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, this is an antidote to all those who still believe exploiting others’ resources - while pretending to be improving their lot - pays off in the end.
Essentially anti-American, this film ridicules the naivety and sentimentality of much US foreign policy and America’s self-proclaimed role as the world’s savior, while the rest of the world concludes it needs saving from America not by it. Its only failing is an inability to get under the skin of the real Vietnam - as inscrutable as its people. However, that really is the point, since that is the very failing exposed here.
Cleverly, a single Vietnamese character stands-in for the whole country and embodies what attracts and fascinates Western Whites about foreign parts that seem ripe for exploitation, but whom never fully give of themselves to the rapine. This being a beautiful young woman, her allegedly-subservient position is repeatedly-undermined by her quiet determination to live an independent life with the man of her choice, rather than a politically-correct marriage-of-convenience with an American so-called protector, liberator and improver.
Do Thi Hai YEN dominates in this role, despite not being an actress, by sheer physical charm and a water-off-a-duck’s-back personality that knows the Europeans are little more than bluff and bluster and that a communist dictatorship is preferable to the tyranny of White racists.
Brendan FRASER fully conveys the typical arrogance, condescension, White supremacy, political naivety, Puritanism and sentimentality of Whites trying to get their own way in the world, under cover of democratic enlightenment and the destruction of international Communism. He also sums up the failure to prevent Communism winning in Vietnam. YEN eloquently personifies the Vietnam raped by White Europeans and North Americans: Inscrutable, pitying the Whites’ inability to both comprehend and to ultimately exercise colonial control. Her beauty attracts and enslaves because it remains a mystery to outsiders.
An exceptional anti-colonial film that bears repeated viewings.
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