The query of what the title means, or what the film means, stay open; even so, this can be a quietly wonderful characteristic debut from 34-year-old Thien An Pham, born in Vietnam and based mostly in Houston, Texas. It’s a jewel of gradual cinema set initially in Saigon after which the mountainous, lush central highlands removed from the town; it’s a zero-gravity epic quest, floating in direction of its unusual narrative future after which possibly floating up over that to one thing else. It’s compassionate, intimate, non secular and mysterious in ways in which jogged my memory of Tsai Ming-liang or Edward Yang.
Contained in the Yellow Cocoon Shell is introduced in a relaxed, unforced realist model with many lengthy, unbroken middle-distance photographs, with closeups a rarity. There’s a flashback and a dream-sequence introduced in precisely the identical manner, resulting in the woozy feeling that previous and current, actuality and reverie are all folding in on one another. The refusal of specific emotion doesn’t forestall one fiercely erotic kissing scene, or a second the place a younger girl declares her adoration for Frank Capra’s It’s a Fantastic Life and wonders aloud: “Why can’t they make motion pictures like that any extra?” I can really think about Bob Rafelson making this movie in 1972 (at half the size) with the identical narrative construction, the identical components of midlife male disaster and remorse.
Within the noisy, bustling metropolis, Thien (Le Phong Vu) is having an unhurried dialog together with his pals about non secular religion and the which means of life at an outside cafe when they’re shocked by a deafening motorcycle crash only a few yards away. His later session at a therapeutic massage parlour is tragicomically interrupted by a name on his smartphone. The fatality in that crash seems to have been his sister-in-law, Hanh, whose five-year-old son, Dao (Nguyen Thinh), miraculously survived. Now it’s Thien’s responsibility to take Hanh’s coffined physique in a rented van to her house village for burial (with little Dao as effectively).
That is additionally his own residence village and that of his brother, Tam, Hanh’s husband, who ran out on her and his son years in the past. Thien should make a reckoning with Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), a younger girl from that village with whom he as soon as had a romantic understanding; she may assist him to do one thing about poor little Dao, whose grief about his mom can solely be guessed at. He should additionally monitor down his runaway brother and … what? Break the information? Use this tragedy as a path to reconciliation? Or make sense of his personal life and his place in an unlimited, placidly detached world?
The digicam drifts and turns with the gradual deliberation of an plane provider: characters will transfer out of shot and preserve speaking off display till the digicam catches up with them and they’re again within the body. A nonetheless tableau will grow to be an virtually imperceptibly gradual zoom. Thien has arresting encounters: an outdated man who as soon as fought with the South Vietnamese on the Battle of Vung Rô, and an outdated girl who’s as enigmatic as a wraith. One complete sequence is just Thien’s viewpoint, in silence, as he drives on his motor-scooter down roads the place the headlights of oncoming site visitors flare right into a screen-filling dazzle.
Is Thien having a breakdown? Or are these latest, desperately unhappy occasions merely giving articulation to a breakdown he may need had anyway? If Hanh had not died, would he not have muddled on together with his unsatisfying, nameless life within the metropolis, and by no means thought to contact Thao or Tam ever once more? The panoramic intelligence of this movie is a surprise.
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