“Is God stuck?” a masseur asks her client as she reaches out to relieve his nether regions at the beginning of Inside the Yellow Cocoon. What seems to be a saucy gag, however, turns out to be merely a humorous take of the question director Pham Tien An poses to the viewer: in this absurd world filled with its tragic ironies, does faith – in fate, in divinity, in history or in humanity – actually matter?
The double innuendo in the sauna scene is actually an exception in the Vietnamese filmmaker’s first feature. Inside the Yellow Cocoon is less about Benny Hill, and so much more about Béla Tarr: across its daunting three-hour screening time, An deploys long tracking shots to follow the characters from one location to another, detailing the landscapes around them and how they might feed into the slow and subtle changes in their mental state.
Revolving around a young Vietnamese city-dweller’s return to his rural hometown to deliver his newly bereaved nephew to an elder brother who hasn’t seen him for years, Inside the Yellow Cocoon transforms a well-trodden premise into something at once mysterious and magically sensual. Shunning the clichéd city-country cultural shock that many a prodigal-son movie has deployed throughout the ages, An instead chooses to zoom in on his protagonist’s philosophical reflections on human existence.
Take the film’s pièce de résistance, an extremely long take which begins with the main character Thien (the excellently subtle Le Phong Vu) playing with his nephew Dao (the vibrant and natural non-professional child actor Nguyen Thinh) on the family farm. After a brief matter-of-fact conversation with his brother-in-law Trung (Vu Ngoc Manh) about domestic tasks, Thien gets on his motorbike and drives down muddy lanes to pay a visit to the local artisan who made the burial shroud for the boy’s deceased mother.
Thien gets off his bike and walks into the house, but the camera doesn’t follow him; instead, cinematographer Dinh Duy Hung slowly zooms in through a window. Out of the darkness of the house, we gradually see an old man appear and overhear his affecting recollections about his personal battles in the Vietnam War (he fought for the U.S.-backed South Vietnam army), how he recovered to take on an art that serves as catharsis for his own trauma, and the certificates and scars he has to show for it all. Lasting for nearly 25 minutes, this single take testifies to the incredible technique of young Vietnamese filmmakers, and to their sensitivity in making it work beyond a visual stunt.
Inside the Yellow Cocoon bowed in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight, where An was propelled to international attention four years ago by winning an award with his one-take, 14-minute Stay Awake, Be Ready. Filmed on a bustling street corner in Ho Chi Minh City – or Saigon, the traditional name of the city which still peppers the characters’ conversation and shopfront billboards – the short film uses a static camera to zoom in and out, to reveal many things happening within its (time) frame. Three young men sit around a streetside food stall to talk about blind chance in life, their conversation punctuated (or egged on) by a deadly traffic accident happening just offscreen.
In his production notes, An said Stay Awake, Be Ready was actually developed as a trial for the things he could do for his first feature. And a reworked version of the short indeed kicked off Inside the Yellow Cocoon, except this time round we see the traffic crash with its heap of mangled bodies. The three young men’s Godot-esque conversation continues afterwards in a sauna, when the gangly, half-naked trio agree that coincidences are incomprehensible.
It turns out there’s a point in making the traffic accident visible. Just as the masseur is offering them some off-the-menu service, Thien gets a phone call in which he learns of a similar crash which killed his sister-in-law; incredibly, her son, who was travelling with her on a sidecar, survived nearly unscathed. Unable to leave his nephew unattended and bored with his job making tedious wedding videos (something An himself, an information technology graduate, actually does to earn a living), Thien sorts out his sister-in-law’s paperwork before taking the boy to his hometown.
The shot depicting Thien’s meeting with a bureaucrat at the death certificate office suggests what An aims to explore later in the peaceful countryside. Leaving an abnormal amount of headspace above Thien and the apparatchik as they hammer out the banal paperwork for Thien’s sister-in-law, it’s as if some kind of invisible spirit is hovering above them, awaiting the conclusion of such worldly matters before leading the dead and the living to another world.
The scenes announces a shifting of visual gears as Thien arrives in his mist-covered, humid hometown. And it’s here that his existential doubts about his life are repeatedly challenged by the people around him. During his sister-in-law’s funeral, the pastor speaks of how she relied on her religious faith to give birth to Dao, despite doctors’ warnings of potential physical risks for her and her baby. Dao himself remains innocent enough to believe that all people are good, and there’s a “beautiful place” for them after death; Mr Luu, the soldier-turned-shroud-maker, still holds on to his old loyalties and convictions, something which must have been incredible given Hanoi’s official narrative about the anti-imperialistic nature of the Vietnam War.
But Thien’s foundations are really shaken when he meets Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh) during the lavishly choreographed and moodily lit Catholic funeral. A nun who teaches at a local school where Thien tries to enroll Dao, Thao turns out to be the young man’s ex; it’s partly because of their breakup, which according to a protracted flashback was due to her father’s disapproval of their relationship, which drove Thien away to the city. Through conversations in the present and the past, we hear of Thao’s commitment to Thien; then hurt by his lukewarm reaction, she professes her wish to dedicate herself to the Church.
It’s here that the film begins to wobble, as the stilted, expositional dialogue in flashback jars with the enigmatic ambience An has maintained so far. In its slightly rambling final third, the film sends Thien on yet another journey further afield to find his brother Tam, but his encounters this time round – with yet another elder imparting sage morsels of wisdom about the human soul, and a reconciliatory meeting that might or might not have revealed Tam’s whereabouts – yield increasingly diminished returns compared to the powerful emotional punch of what went before. An and his young team’s immense faith in their own take on cinema could use some worldly advice about pacing; with that done, In the Yellow Cocoon might eventually be seen as the breakout of a new filmmaking voice from Saigon.
Director, screenwriter, editor: Pham Tien An
Cast: Le Phong Vu, Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh, Nguyen Thinh, Vu Ngoc Manh
Producers: Jeremy Chua, Tran Van Thi
Executive producer: Tran Van Thi
Cinematography: Dinh Duy Hung
Production designers: Pham Thien An, Huynh Phuong Hien
Sound designer: Vuong Gia Bao, Xander Toh
Production companies: JK Film Potocol
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Vietnamese
182 minutes