Hoa Binh

There is inside war, and there is outside war. Most of us have watched Vietnam only from the outside--where battles are spread out in the distance for everyone to see, where you can choose sides and keep score. But inside war, there is no coherence, only ignorance and confusion.

Raoul Coutard's Hoa Binh begins on the outside. Its first shot is a map of East Asia, and there is the Vietnam of our mind's eye, a twisted banana fastened to the Asian underside. The map gives way to images of American soldiers, transporting weapons, rescuing the wounded, and patrolling the jungle. Still, it is Vietnam from without, seen through Western eyes, in terms of bombing targets, helicopter landing zones, bars and whorehouses.

This documentary-like introduction goes on for several minutes, and then there is a delicate but crucial shift of focus that signals a complete change in the film's perspective. Coutard's camera is following an American jeep traveling down a Saigon street; suddenly, through an adjustment of the camera lens, the jeep is gone, and attention is fixed on a Vietnamese bicyclist. From that moment the film has stepped inside the Vietnam War. The frame of reference is wenched from the Americans and returned to the Vietnamese.

Over the past ten years, Raoul Coutard has achieved a reputation as one of the world's great cinematographers. In that time he has worked for almost all of the noted French "New Wave" film makers (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, among others). This is his first directorial effort, and it would seem that his technical background would incline him toward a stylistic self-consciousness. But Coutard is too sure of himself to feel a need to demonstrate his proficiencies. His direction is efficient rather than ostentatious. His concern is with narrative, and the narrative is rigourously simple:

A young Vietnamese returns home to his wife one day and tells her he is leaving to join the Viet Cong. The wife, though ill, is forced to work to feed her two children, a ten-year-old boy named Hung and a baby girl, Xuan. Circumstances deteriorate; the village burns, and the family moves in with unsympathetic relatives. After a time, the wife dies of a sarcoma of the leg, and the two children wander through the city, waiting for their father to return. The remainder of the film follows them: shining shoes, peddling newspapers, begging.

In the figures of the two children, Coutard is trying to recreate the miscomprehension of a people confronted with political forces which they can scarcely begin to understand. He makes no political judgments; the Viet Cong are seen as brutal as the Americans. And because of this studied impartiality, Coutard already has been accused of a political naivete. That may be true, but it is hardly the point. He is interested in a pre-political consciousness still in the first stages of sorting out events.

At one point Hung is shining the shoes of an American officer who repeats official platitudes in a New Yorkese French: "making Vietnam safe for democracy", "twenty years if necessary", and so on. The camera remains at Hung's level, three feet off the ground, and from that perspective the giant presence of the American becomes almost metaphorical. He is mountainous without his face ever being quite visible, too big to be seen and too grandiloquent to be understood.

Hung and Xuan cannot see the fighting as a clash of well-defined political forces. They have no conception of war in the abstract. War is something that has always been there, and it is comprehensible only in concrete instances--a bomb blast in a theatre, a soldier who will buy a newspaper, a father gone for mysterious reasons.

Coutard senses--and rightly--that the Vietnam debate is over. The war is still and always a problem, but it is no longer an issue. No one needs to reassure himself any longer on the Vietnam question, and Coutard is not out to score political points.

Instead, he is out to restore humanity to a country that has too long been grist for everyone's political mill. Part of the crime of Vietnam has been a failure of visualization. It has been too easy to develop a seven o'clock news mentality that agonizes only thirty minutes a day. So Coutard particularizes circumstances and thus humanizes them. Hung is a kind of Vietnamese Huck Finn, and the acting of young Phi Lan in that role is completely sympathetic.

For the most part, Coutard's tone remains one of understatement. He is out to win sympathy not to shock. The war rarely intrudes violently into the path of Hung and Xuan. But it is always in the background--in the insistent beating of helicopter wings or the constant presence of Americans in uniform.

And even when Coutard falls toward sentiment, when he lingers too long over Xuan crying or exploits an especial cuteness in Hung's expression, it is not so much an indulgence as a tactic. He is playing on sentiment only as a way of striking through the numbness of Western response toward Vietnam.

In other circumstances the last scene of the film--Hung meeting his father in the street--would be mere mawkishness. But here nothing is resolved; the father must return to the Viet Cong; the war will go on. And any sentiment is quickly swallowed up in the sense of futility.

Hoa Binh is as fond and as compassionate a film as I can imagine coming out of the Vietnam War. It locates the tragedy where it belongs--among the Vietnamese. It is a good movie about a bad war.

I think: what if it had been made ten years ago? Or: what if Nixon had seen Hoa Binh twice instead of Patton?