Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L'Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung c and Bargirls/Gái nhy

Abstract

This article addresses representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in four films made since d -ô i mo i, the opening up of Vietnam to western influences, initiated in 1986. The Lover/L'Amant (1992) is a Franco-British heritage film which reconstructs the city from a Eurocentric neocolonial perspective, while Cyclo/Xích lô (1995), a French-funded film made by a France-based Vietnamese filmmaker, is a contemporary poetic thriller which treats the city expressively as the site of present-day corruption and violence. The nostalgia evident in these two 'outsider' films is contrasted with the more complex views of the city in two state-funded low-budget 'insider' films by local Vietnamese filmmakers, Collective Flat/Chung cu (1999) and Bargirls/Gái nhay (2003); the first, an intellectual fable set in the decade or so following reunification/Independence in 1975 which recalls an attempt at collective living, the second, a hugely popular treatment of contemporary urban realities, both corrupt and progressive. Examining how the mise-en-scène and narratives of the city differ from film to film, the essay takes the representation of the city through changing historical, political, social and economic times, from colonial-orientalist Saigon to corrupt, capitalist Ho Chi Minh City via the slow degeneration of the postwar socialist/collectivist experiment. In so doing, it confirms the importance of the films' moments and contexts of production in the construction of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City as a cinematic 'city-text'.

Saigon from the diaspora

“…This figure of Saigon as a woman, embodied in the first clip in the elegant and ladylike Khánh Hà, and in the second by the ‘trashy’ local girls singled out for criticism by the female viewers, is interesting to ponder in terms of Do and Tarr's (2008) analysis of Bar Girls . We rediscover here the familiar trope of ‘woman as nation’, or rather woman's symbolic body as being the ground on which the nation is staged (Yuval‐Davis & Anthias, 1989; Walby, 1996).…”

Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the special issue on cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city

“…The essays of Tess Do and Carrie Tarr (2008) and Ashley Carruthers (2008) both analyze cinematic and music video representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. The turbulent history of this Vietnamese city is marked by its very name change: from being Saigon of the colonial era to being named after the ‘father of the nation’ of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam brings in train the history of the revolutionary wars, first against the colonial French and then the protracted civil war between the communist north and the US‐supported south.…”