Somewhere in the beginning of Cu Li Never Cries, an elderly performer on TV is shown singing a legendary (and admittedly quirky) English-language folk song dedicated to Ho Chi Minh. When the song ends, a woman is asked what she thinks of it; she laughs and says she never heard it before. “I’m just 21!”
This small footnote speaks volumes about what Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Ngoc Lan’s first feature is about. Bowing in the Berlinale’s Panorama sidebar, Cu Li Never Cries is about a clash of mindsets of people from different generations with their own long-gone traumas and current concerns, and how this schism plays out in a country where the past never leaves and the future seems to never come.
Unlike Jia Zhangke or Zhang Dalei across the border in China, Lan doesn’t offer that much commentary about the fallout of his country’s transformation from a socialist bastion into a hyper-charged market economy.
In Cu Li Never Cries, history and politics are instead deployed to highlight personal struggles, with the divergent experiences and worldviews of his two leads – the first a long-retired hydroelectrical plant worker old enough to have arthritis and a dead husband, and the second a child-like kindergarten teacher awaiting marriage – simply narrative devices to depict the uncertainties they have about their private lives.
Revolving around a retiree’s struggle to contend with her bereavement and her pregnant niece’s rocky preparations for marriage, Cu Li Never Cries is filmed in crisp monochrome and is imbued with moments of magical realism. With its swerving tracking shots through empty downtown alleyways and nocturnal forests, spying on the presence of a small loris as a pet or a glitterball used as home décor, Lan’s feature teases lyrical beauty from its seemingly quotidian storyline.
With this film, Lan – who trained as an urban planner before switching his career to filmmaking – joins a new cohort of Vietnamese filmmakers such as Pham Thien An (Inside the Yellow Cocoon) who have captured the attention of foreign producers and film funds with their new brand of cinema. Melancholic and meandering, Cu Li Never Cries will draw inevitable comparisons with Lav Diaz’s work, something which may appeal to festival programmers.
The story begins with a woman, Nguyen (Chau), who returns to Hanoi to find chaos at home. She has been abroad to collect the ashes and the pet loris (the “Cu Li” in the title) of her estranged husband, who she met when she moved to communist East Germany as a migrant worker (“Cu Li” = coolie in Vietnamese) during the Cold War. Her niece, the kindergarten teacher Van (Ha Phuong), is unravelling because of the shambolic preparations for her upcoming wedding, something not helped by a pregnancy she’s trying to keep secret from her aunt.
Van is also disgruntled by the utter incompetence of her fiancé Quang (Xuan An), who spends most of his time either dabbling with impractical things or hanging out with his slacker friends. For the boys, marriage is just an inevitable a part of life like birth or death: “What’s the point of wandering around alone on Earth?”
Van and Quang represent a generation of young people who have seemingly lost the impetus to aspire to something meaningful in life. The young man’s habit of invariably describing the most mundane happenings as a “fairy tale”, be it a shop that closed before it’s supposed to or a chance meeting with an ordinary acquaintance, reveals how ideals and dreams have lost their currency in a world where people just want to get by.
This is in contrast to the older Nguyen, whose nostalgia for her days as a model worker is less a wish to return to the good old Socialist days, than memories of how she once clamored for something bigger and better – whether in the shape of a mythical workers’ paradise, or a more comfortable life as the Communist system hit the buffers in 1990. Such reminisces lead her to attend old-school dancing sessions in a drinking hall, and finally a trip to her hometown to visit her former comrades.
At the centre of Cu Li is Chau, who is remarkable as someone trying her utmost to carry on despite her deteriorating physical condition. But the power of her performance also rests with the screenplay Lan co-wrote with Nghiem Quynh Trung and also the latter’s production design. The contradictions in Hanoi’s urban landscape – where overloaded, rickety bicycles sputter their ways beneath mega-flyovers – are in a way reflective of Nguyen’s own existence in a world where “the forgotten became familiar, and the familiar became foreign”.
Director: Pham Ngoc Lan
Screenwriters: Pham Ngoc Lan, Nghiem Quynh Trang
Cast: Minh Chau, Ha Phuong, Xuan An, Hoang Ha
Producers: Nigiem Quynh Trang, Tran Thi Bich Ngoc
Executive producers: Su Ting Teh, Giang Le
Directors of photography: Vu Hoang Trieu, Nguyen Vinh Phuc, Nguyen Phan Linh Dan
Editor: Julie Béziau
Production designer: Nghiem Quynh Trang
Music producer: Tran Kim Ngoc
Production companies: Cadence Studio, An Nam Productions
World sales: Square Eyes
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Vietnamese
92 minutes