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| Images courtesy of Whole Grain Pictures |
Vietnamese writer-director Ham Tran’s searing antidote and
closest analogue to Oliver Stone’s Vietnam refugee immigration drama Heaven
and Earth, the 2006 multilingual Vietnamese-American historical epic Journey
from the Fall, has had a difficult journey to its eventual blu-ray disc
release from Whole Grain Pictures. Despite
ascending to major film accolades and critical adulation following it’s 2006
Sundance Film Festival screening, the film disappeared from the marketplace
until newcomer boutique label Whole Grain Pictures saw fit to grant the
true-to-life dramatization of the experiences of Vietnamese refugees whether it
be in reeducation camps or hastily escaping by boat a fully furnished blu-ray
disc replete with a full CD soundtrack album and extensive extras. Looking at it as a newcomer years after
inception, it manages to be even more devastating than the aforementioned
Oliver Stone film and more down to Earth without that filmmaker’s hyperkinetic
aesthete. Mostly it’s the first major
Vietnam War film from the Vietnamese outlook.
In April 30th, 1975, following the end of the
Vietnam twenty-year civil war and subsequent exodus of thousands of refugees,
Long Nguyen playing himself despite loyalty to the conquered South Vietnamese government
elects to remain behind at his home in Vietnam.
Captured and imprisoned in a reeducation camp where he suffers a
dehumanizing brutal physical and psychological ordeal, Ngyuen urges his wife
Mai (Diem Lien), their son Lai (Nguyen Thai Nguyen) and mother Ba Noi (Kieh Chinh)
to risk their lives by escaping across the ocean on a dingy fishing boat
evading coast guards and ruthless sea pirates in the hope of reaching the
United States land of freedom.
Cross-cutting between the past-and-present, juxtaposing Long Nguyen’s endurance
and suffering with that of his family on the boat, their respective harrowing
experiences soon shift over to the newly formed family life of immigration in
the United States and all the difficulties including but not limited to Lai
cutting classes and being generally rebellious.
The much-needed dialogue of pointing out what happened to
the Vietnamese people after the American military withdrawal and how those who
lived through the harrowing ordeal managed to carry on in a foreign land, Journey
from the Fall though an extended and arduous journey nevertheless is a
powerful saga of pain, sorrow, terror and finally acceptance of their newfound
situation as long as everyone sticks together as a family unit.
Shot in 1.85:1 by Guillermo Rosas and Julie
Kirkwood with an appropriately somber score by Christopher Wong, the look and
feel of Journey from the Fall is hot, encroaching, claustrophobic and
suffocating for most of it before finally making its way to America where other
problems await our family of refugees.
The cast of Vietnamese actors from Long Nguyen who has gone on to make
quite a career in American movies, to Kiue Chinh as the grandmother and Diem
Lien as Mai and later Cat Ly as Phuong, all give impassioned powerful
performances conveying a wide variety of emotions from terror, grief, rage and
finally some dogged measure of calm.
Though released in North America in 2006, the punch-to-the-gut
film all but vanished from the marketplace until very recently with the arrival
of newly formed boutique label Whole Grain Pictures who have gone above and
beyond the call of duty for such a clandestine foreign indie. While the comparisons between it and Heaven
and Earth are inevitable, this one somehow felt more authentic and less
flashy, instead conveying the ordeals without pushing moviegoers out of their
seats while conveying the alienation of trying to integrate into American
society. One of the best Vietnamese
films ever made, this disc release from Whole Grain Pictures is splendid and marks
an important forward step in curating or cultivating East Asian cinema either
criminally overlooked or long overdue for reappraisal. Not an easy film to sit through but a journey
I’m proud to have taken.
--Andrew Kotwicki
