-
1. Manufacturing Feminine Virtue: The Films of Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung
- Temple University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 / Manufacturing Feminine Virtue: The Films of Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung In the mid-1990s, Hồ Chí Minh City and Hà Nội banned the use of cyclos on their main thoroughfares, restricting the vehicles to the cities’ key tourist zones. Despite the prohibitions, sightseeing in a cyclo remains the tourist commodity par excellence, lavishly described in travel brochures and on websites as an obligatory experience when traveling in what is still designated as “Indochina.”1 The cyclo is a product of the colonial era, a tri-wheeled vehicle consisting of a wide, reclining chair for the passenger, slung low to the ground between the front two wheels, pedaled by a driver (always a man) mounted behind and above the passenger . While cyclos have been used by locals, they hold a particular fascination for tourists, for whom the ride can evoke a sense of colonial romance and the lingering desire to master an alien and urban landscape through an imperialist gaze. Contemporary filmmakers, well aware of the symbolic meaning of the cyclo for tourists, have used the cyclo and its driver to comment on tourism and the contradictions of Việt Nam’s socialist-capitalist economy, caught at the intersections between technological advancement and devolution. This chapter examines the films of Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung, where the cyclo and its driver have been used to drive home the wretchedness of poverty in postwar Việt Nam. Tony Bui was a briefly lauded Vietnamese American director, while the highly acclaimed Vietnamese French director Tran Anh Hung is the most prominent director in the diaspora. Tran’s Cyclo (1995) and Bui’s Three Seasons (1999) are parallel films that reflect the themes and practices of collaboration, and are themselves examples of the fraught 24 / manufacturing feminine virtue process of collaboration. To make their points, these filmmakers deploy not only the cyclo and its male driver but also the figure of the female sex worker who serves, like the cyclo driver, as a sign of wretchedness. More than this, the prostitute’s sexual relations with her clientele—essentially her collaboration with foreign capital—metaphorize the country’s own entrance into a market economy at the start of Đổi Mới, the era of capitalist market reforms that began in 1986. Situated in this historical context, women’s bodies in such films are symbols of exploitation that critique the capitalistic forces at work in Việt Nam. My readings of these films further reveal that women’s bodies are used to buttress a patriarchal ideology in which it is men who produce art and culture, while women labor to reproduce the nation and tradition. As laboring subjects, female sex workers are especially negated in this equation and must be transformed by the films’ conclusions in order for them to become productive workers for the national family. In contrast to women’s bodies, men’s bodies in the same films are associated with an enlightened and artistic subjectivity and do not carry a moral valence in relationship to labor. The cyclo driver is made central in these films; through his ability to see and drive the narrative, he reterritorializes for spectators the space of “Vietnam.” Vis-à-vis these gendered figures, diasporic male directors recreate a “Vietnam” strongly inflected by nostalgia. With such strikingly similar characters in both films, this chapter argues that Cyclo and Three Seasons articulate a masculinist sensibility expressed at the expense of Vietnamese women’s subjectivity. It analyzes Cyclo and Three Seasons, as well as two other films by these directors that take up the themes above (Bui’s Yellow Lotus and Tran’s The Scent of Green Papaya) to underline a specifically masculinist pattern in the ways Vietnamese womanhood has been represented in diasporic films. In these films women oscillate between the polarities of purity and impurity, depending on the nature of their sexual and domestic labors.2 Tran and his films use an ahistorical pattern of commemorating women’s labor and discourse against the “reality” of Vietnamese quotidian life, paying visual homage to women’s work along a trajectory unmarked by any changes in time and space despite the changing historical moments in which the films are set. As the director moves from a studio setting of 1950s Sài Gòn (The Scent of Green Papaya) to onlocation shooting in present-day Việt Nam (Cyclo), a suspension of timespace occurs: neither women’s relations with different classes of women nor their relationship to their...