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Movie Diary 22/6/15
22
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Rose Byrne and Melissa McCarthy in 'Spy'.
Inside Out (2015) – In which Pete Docter combines the emotional punch of his celebrated life-spanning montage in Up with the multiple worlds of Wreck-It Ralph. It combines emotional acuity with a headlong sense of invention: once Joy (Amy Poehler, in what is basically a reprise of her Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation) and Sadness set off on their journey around the brain, the movie rarely covers the same ground twice but finds new ways to represent (among other things) dreams, the selectivity of memory and monsters dwelling in the subconscious. It’s a meditation on the processes of thought that’s also a crowd-pleaser; the movie’s ingenuity pays off emotionally as its conceits play across the face of a plainly distressed 11 year-old girl. My only reservation was that it’s more exciting conceptually than it is visually: the brain’s surfaces are plasticky, generic – like some mass-produced toy – and the emotions’ command centre looks like the dashboard of a car. Still, this belongs in the upper reaches of the Pixar canon. ****
Jurassic World (2015) – Rather than exploring the narrative possibilities of dinosaurs on the loose in a park fully populated by tourists, this sequel goes for a lazy rehash of the original. Once again the focus is on a makeshift family with a couple of lonely kids at its centre, as if this were the only way to make dinosaurs interesting. Added to this is a truly retrograde attitude to gender: the heroine (Bryce Dallas Howard) is made to feel like a terrible person for working long hours and her P.A. is killed in lingering fashion (she’s passed from pterodactyl to pterodactyl) for being an inattentive child-minder. The movie even manages the difficult feat of making Chris Pratt – striking manly poses with a bottle of Coke in his hand – unappealing. The reverence with which Spielberg unveiled his digital bestiary is long gone: there’s precious little wonder on offer here, only a sour sense of cynicism. *
Spy (2015) – The tone of the James Bond franchise is so close to parody anyway that this broad comedy works surprisingly well as an example of the globetrotting capers it’s spoofing. Paul Feig doesn’t always make the most of his terrific cast – Allison Janney doesn’t get to do much more than drop the occasional cuss word – and the gags aren’t always thought through the way they are on the comparable Amy Schumer sketch “Plain Jane”. The humiliations piled on Melissa McCarthy by her employer feel a bit egregious, especially given her super-competence as an agent: it’s the lazy idea that because McCarthy is fat she must also be physically gross. It’s good, silly fun, though, with moments of violence that keep you off-balance. (A sneeze with fatal consequences sets the tone early on.) Jude Law is perfect casting as the self-infatuated 007 type and Rose Byrne and her massive pile of hair steal every scene they’re in. ***
The Tribe (2014) – Formally, this Ukrainian film – performed entirely in sign language – is very striking. The long, dispassionate takes – the characters are kept always at a distance – are expertly staged, as the camera roams through the school for the deaf that is the film’s setting. The use of sound – the background of vehicles and footfalls – intensifies the silence of the human interactions. The style has an almost hypnotic effect. The movie falls down, though, in its lack of human sense. The school is so isolated from the hearing world (none of the children appear to have parents or any external connection) that it seems more like a conceit than an actual place. The central drama – a teenage pimp’s bid to own one of the prostitutes under his supervision – is caveman stuff passed off as tender teen romance. In the end, the film’s unrelieved grimness feels like a limitation. **
Movie Diary – Sydney Film Festival 2015 edition
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06
Ryan Phillippe in '54'.
Cartel Land (2015) – Matthew Heineman’s closeness to his subjects – vigilante movements on either side of the US/Mexico border – proves a mixed blessing. As he shows Dr. Mireles – leader of the Autodefensas – speechifying, at work in his medical practice, relaxing with his family, Heineman seems to be participating in the creation of a folk hero; the Autodefensas’ armed raids on the Knights Templar drug cartel are shot for excitement, as an adrenalin rush. You could argue that Heineman’s approach captures the appeal of such movements, and the picture becomes more complicated in the film’s latter stages. But these armed insurgents with their law and order rhetoric are not so different from ISIS (we see the good doctor order a man’s execution for sporting the wrong tattoo), and for too much of its running time this movie comes dangerously close to endorsing them. **
54: The Director’s Cut (2015) – The movie’s debt to Saturday Night Fever was always obvious: Mark Christopher’s restored version proves a worthy successor to that disco classic. Christopher’s portrait of the dancefloor gets at its utopian aspects – its inclusiveness and its potential for self-invention (the floor at Studio 54 is like a masque ball) – and the holy feeling when the music and the drugs are just right. It’s aware too of its excess and its potential for exploitation, and how stubbornly differences of class and gender persist outside that magic space. The movie’s examination of the power of male beauty and its limitations is uncomfortably apt when it comes to the career of Ryan Phillippe. He’s at the height of his prettiness here, and the film’s gay sensibility is in the camera’s frank worship of that beauty as much as his character’s newly explicit bisexuality. The climax – an avalanche of disasters at the dawn of the 80s – still feels a bit on the nose, but this film reanimates an era. ***
Hill of Freedom (2014) – This precious, pretentious movie, with its pointlessly scrambled timeline, is yet another Valentine to male passivity, where the protagonist’s glum indecision proves irresistible to everyone around him. Moro (Ryo Kase) is in Seoul for the declared purpose of finding a lover he met on a previous visit. However, it’s only late in the film that he actually goes to visit her apartment. He’d rather moon around in her general vicinity: everyone he encounters seems to find this adorable. Because Moro is Japanese and speaks no Korean, most of his interactions are in English (the second language that he and the locals have in common): the halting conversations that result are certainly an apt rendering of expat experience, but they’re still a drag to sit through. It’s an infuriating movie. **
Our Little Sister (2015) – In broad outline – abandoned by their mother, a group of siblings must get on in her absence – this is similar to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s previous film Nobody Knows, but the treatment here is totally different. These characters are never in jeopardy; even those who die do so in an orderly fashion, attended by their loved ones. It’s closer in tone to a ‘woman’s picture’ like How to Make an American Quilt, preoccupied by female relationships and taking in boyfriends and work and the passing of knowledge between generations. To this genre Kore-eda brings his luminous sense of faces and the small details of household life – his gift for noticing. His unstressed style doesn’t punch up or falsify the big moments, the way a Hollywood version might. Though it turns a bit flabby in its second half, its warmth and specificity are very pleasurable. ***
Results (2015) – The director of Funny Ha Ha is still fascinated by indecision, but it plays differently with this older set of characters. They’re not so much keeping their options open as stuck in patterns, with painful histories to live down. At the outset the movie seems equally interested in its three leads, but it soon skews to the two men: its comparative lack of curiosity about Cobie Smulders’ Kat (she disappears for a long stretch before being parachuted in at the end) is the movie’s main flaw. Smulders makes a strong impression anyway, with her self-control that so easily gives way to anger. Andrew Bujalski’s stroke is to situate these lost people in the fitness industry, with its earnest sense of self-improvement: his characters are striving for perfection even as they go nowhere. Guy Pearce is particularly funny as an Australian gym owner. ***
Tales (2014) – Rakhshan Bani-Etemad may have devised the structure of her film – a series of small portraits of Tehran – to evade the Iranian censors, but it results in a scope (the different stories cut across class and gender) and a panoramic sense of place reminiscent of Altman’s great ensemble dramas. The set-ups are exceedingly simple (often we’re stuck with the characters in a moving vehicle), which emphasises the eloquence with which these people narrate themselves and their hardships. The transitions between stories are elegantly handled: the narrative baton sometimes passes almost imperceptibly, our focus transferred from one character to another in the course of a scene. The way peripheral characters come to the centre (and vice versa) puts these stories in context. It’s simple in the best sense – beautifully designed. ****
Movie Diary 28/5/15
28
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Charlize Theron in ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’.
Birdman (2014) – A superhero is an apt metaphor for a Norman Mailer-type male artist obsessed with potency and his sense of himself as exceptional. Alejandro González Iñárritu and his co-writers find a host of meanings in Michael Keaton’s masked alter-ego, from snarky commentary on the Marvel movie marketplace to the lovely lyricism when he takes flight over Manhattan. The movie works on your nerves: most of the characters are italicised versions of recognisable theatre types (playing the sole civilian, Amy Ryan is lovely oasis of calm) – the brat fresh out of rehab, the self-serious Actor, the contemptuous, patrician critic – and the camera moves with them through a claustrophobic backstage warren, the drum score urging them on, into pissing contests and desperate pleas for validation. It’s obvious, but the acid comedy is often very funny. The movie’s attitude to suicide, however – which it shares with its model, Black Swan – is troubling. It’s a different sort of cliché – the Romantic one that equates artistic fulfilment with madness and death – and Iñárritu’s handling of it feels glib and unearned. ***
Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) – Like Birdman, Oliver Assayas’ movie offers behind-the-scenes glimpses of the place where celebrity and theatre intersect, shot in intimate long takes and replete with topical references to the Marvel era. However, it does so to entirely different effect: where the roving camera in Birdman‘s cramped backstage environs is out to give you the dirty truth about its characters, Assayas prefers to leave his meanings open. He structures his film like a play, complete with acts and long scenes in contained environments; like a playwright, he locates drama in the interactions between his characters. The fact that the movie concerns the rehearsals for a (nonexistent) play could have sent it down a meta-fictional rabbit hole, but the unaffected, intense teamwork of Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart imbues it with reality and stakes. In the course of the film their identities become mutable; the dissolution of self is not (as in Birdman) a glamorous apotheosis but a professional hazard to be faced and defied. ****
Selma (2014) – Ava DuVernay’s movie has a stately rhythm that seems keyed to Martin Luther King’s oratory; the period recreations never seem static but add sensory richness to its flow. It’s as interested in how King constructed his persona (we see him rehearsing his sermons, calculating the way his actions will play in the media) and his strategic calculations regarding Lyndon Baines Johnson as it is in his moral seriousness. It offers a dynamic, multifaceted portrait of a great man. David Oyelowo is as compelling in his private moments with his wife as he is leading the marches at the film’s centre. I could quibble with some of DuVernay’s choices – her reliance on slow motion in the passages of violence tends to undermine rather than intensify their impact – and there are moments in Paul Webb’s screenplay where a scene’s narrative function is too obvious, but this is historical drama that never feels like school. It’s physical and grave, controlled and full of fire. ***
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – In the crowd of goons pursuing Charlize Theron there’s an electric guitarist in red velvet and a gimp mask; he swoops in a loose harness, his instrument ejaculating fire. He’s an emblem for this noisy, rococo movie, with its ravening appetite for the grotesque. The title is a feminist bait-and-switch: it’s Theron’s film, with Tom Hardy’s Mad Max brought along as a helpmeet. (Theron dominates so completely that I wondered why George Miller didn’t drop his nominal protagonist.) Its most daring quality is the way it forgoes narrative: it’s two hours of continuous action, with only the barest nods to character and motivation, and its onrush has a thrilling, almost abstract force. Even a simple fistfight in the sand is staged with so many elements in play – a hose, a number of guns, and an enormous pair of bolt-cutters – that it becomes a whirling contraption. At the times the movie suggests Baz Luhrmann, if Luhrmann employed his pet techniques – the densely packed misc-en-scene, the florid performances in full close-up – not to ingratiate himself with audiences but to knock us flat on our arses. Miller delivers an expert pummelling. ****
Germs
25
05
There are germs on the Uno cards, germs on the textas.
Oysters of snot
lodged in kids’ nostrils,
wet coughs that spray
unimpeded by hands.
Every surface crawls:
we take inadequate refuge
in hand washing.
The moment we touch anything
we’re back in bacteria.
Every public surface
takes on that menace:
door handles, buttons on buses.
The sniffling man two seats behind.
Germs.
Kids have an advantage
in their spread:
their unabashed interface,
taking the world in their mouths like dogs,
chewing on their hat strings,
clambering
over everything.
They say a year in school
will proof
your immune system,
an inoculating bath of germs.
It isn’t true.
I wiped my nose
on my wrist
so as not to touch my hands,
a spendthrift
with my sick days.
Defending health
like a princess in a tower,
from the hostile world
of germs.
There are germs lurking in the beanbags,
folded in the pages of books.
Palmed on sports equipment;
spat on Lego pieces. Germs.
A McDonald’s Birthday Party
22
05
A McDonald’s birthday party.
Ice cream cake included
and red cardboard crowns
that turn us into signs
in photos. Happy and bearing our brands across time.
It was a treat then, clamoured for:
the shaker fries in a paper bag,
milkshake flavours
for a limited time. Collect them all.
The lonely figurine, its companions
released over weeks.
Little Kermit on his skateboard.
Piggy in her car. We came back,
pressing the stickers to our placemats.
We became regular, as was intended.
We hoarded the sauces,
the tubs in a cupboard at home
with the sachets of salt and sugar.
It was largesse to be raided,
we the poor relatives
swiping what we could.
We never used the salt,
but things had for free
were an undeniable good.
McDonald’s could afford it.
I have my party here:
there’s no playground at this one
but it still counts.
It’s the same as James’
but this is my occasion.
He’s at the end of the table
and I have crowned him
as he crowned me.
The whole class was invited.
And to cap it all,
here comes Ronald
– as famous as Santa –
bearing my pastel cold cake,
solid ice cream. Here’s my recognition,
admission to the monolith.
It’s a McDonald’s birthday party,
and I have passed
beneath the arches.
I squint and
make a wish.
Postcard from Saigon
27
04
The Royal Palace, Phnom Penh.
#1 – Palaces
When Lee Kuan Yew died recently, part of his legacy was a new form of government. Long before China adopted free market reforms, Lee was the first to demonstrate that capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go hand in hand. In Singapore he created a state in which citizens were free to turn profits but not to voice dissent. He showed that a free market economy could coexist quite comfortably with authoritarian government. (The swift response in the days after Lee’s death to a teenager’s critical YouTube video showed the strong arm of the government in action.) In some ways it’s a purer version of capitalism, in which trade can proceed without the potential disruptions of culture or political protest.
Some version of Lee’s authoritarian government exists in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Vietnam and Laos are explicitly one-party states; though Cambodia has opposition parties and a much freer press, Prime Minister Hun Sen and the Cambodian People’s Party have ruled the country for over 30 years. Patriotism and the veneration of leaders are more or less compulsory. There’s a particular approach too to the sites of power – the palaces and other government buildings that make manifest the might of the state. In Australia there’s a squat bureaucratic dullness to most government buildings: they’re not out to wow or intimidate, and no especial deference is expected towards them. Uncritical respect is the last thing Australians feel for their politicians and it was sometimes disconcerting to visit countries where this was the only permissible attitude.
It’s interesting to see how this veneration is expressed through iconography. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh is the face you see everywhere; a benign portrait of Ho against a light blue background can be glimpsed in many businesses and homes, much as older Australians hang portraits of Queen Elizabeth. He’s often in the background of propaganda posters, too, exhorting and encouraging. Ho’s image is common as Laos as well – Vietnam takes a special interest in its smaller neighbour – but his Laotian equivalent is Kaysone Phomvihane, the leader of the Pathet Laos when they took power in 1975. (He’s presented in the same format, smiling in a field of light blue.) Cambodia differs from its neighbours: the icon of the state is not Hun Sen or any of his colleagues in the CPP. It’s King Norodom Sihamoni. The current king is pictured on an elaborate gold throne, in a ceremonial uniform decorated with medals and a broad red sash and gold braiding at the collar and sleeves. Usually he’s flanked by simpler portraits of his mother and father.
Of the three countries, Cambodia is the only one that still has a monarchy. The last Nguyen emperor abdicated in favour of Ho Chi Minh in 1945; Bao Dai spent most of the rest of his life in the south of France. The last king in Laos was not so lucky: after the Communist takeover King Sisavang Vatthana and his family were sent to a remote re-education camp where they reportedly died of malaria, extinguishing the royal line. By contrast, the present king’s father Norodom Sihanouk was the prime political actor in Cambodia for the first twenty years of its independence, and returned to rule in a ceremonial capacity after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. The monarchy no longer exercises much political power, but it continues to be important as a symbol. In all three countries the belief persists that the king (or the Communist leader who supplanted him) is the embodiment of the state.
The Royal Palace, Phnom Penh.
The Silver Pagoda, Phnom Penh.
You can see this continued prestige in the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. It’s not a bombed-out wreck like the Nguyen Citadel in Hue or a modest, stale museum like the Palace in Luang Prabang. It’s a symbolic site that has retained its potency – the seat of the king. It’s situated at the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap Rivers; there’s a public park between it and the water, a popular meeting place for locals at night. A huge double-sided portrait of Norodom Sihamoni dominates the park, in an elaborate frame two storeys high; at night this lights up, bathing the area in yellow light. The palace grounds are both opulent and precise. A team of gardeners trim the trees and hedges, the palms that open in perfect fans. The buildings are spaced for maximum clarity: each stands surrounded by broad paths and geometrical garden plots. Two small buildings flank the throne room, pointing up its size; appropriately enough, one houses gifts from other heads of state. The Cambodian king is viewed as the defender of the country’s Buddhist faith, and the palace grounds are neighboured by another complex of pagodas and stupas memorialising various kings. At the centre of this stands the Silver Pagoda, so named because it’s floored entirely in silver. The Palace is truly fabulous, its calm, ordered beauty a sharp contrast to the city outside its walls. One of the privileges of power is the ability to maintain these luxurious surfaces, to organise space in this rational way.
Reunification Palace, Saigon: the President's private cinema.
Reunification Palace, Saigon: the President's games room.
This privilege is present at the Reunification Palace in Saigon also. It’s been kept much as it was in 1975, when North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the front gates. We visited shortly before the 40th anniversary of the North’s victory: a stage had been set up in front of the Palace, and a troupe of young dancers rehearsed a routine for the upcoming celebrations. It was the home of the President of South Vietnam; it’s an impressive building, the exterior clad in concrete ribs that enclose it while still allowing air to circulate, the state rooms opening onto long cool balconies. There’s a real eloquence to this erstwhile site of power that’s now allowed to stand empty. There’s surprisingly little editorialising about the US-backed regime: the nearest thing to it is the information that President Nguyen Van Thieu converted a rooftop space – intended by the architect as a place for the leader to meditate on great matters of state – into a dancefloor. There’s no need for editorialising: the fact that the building’s now a museum testifies to its place on the losing side of history.
Postcard from Phnom Penh #2
8
04
Tuol Sleng.
#2 – Ghosts
There’s a ghostly underlay to Phnom Penh, a city beneath the city today. That city is empty. When the Khmer Rouge defeated the US-backed Lon Nol regime in 1975 and took power, their first act was to completely evacuate the capital. The city’s inhabitants were rounded up and put to work in forced labour camps in the countryside. The Khmer Rouge idealised the peasantry (or “base people” in their own parlance): their method for eliminating class distinctions was to make everyone a peasant, to put everyone to work in the fields. For a period of almost five years, Phnom Penh (and other large towns throughout the country) stood deserted. It’s curious to walk through a place, knowing that its human population could disappear so completely: it makes the human presence there seem only provisional. The crowds of tuk-tuk drivers sleeping through the midday heat, the fruit sellers in the markets, the parents queued up on motorbikes to pick their kids up from school: all of these people (or their parents or grandparents) were swept from the place and returned only after terrible privation.
This aura is especially strong around Tuol Sleng (or S-21), the prison where people the Khmer Rouge had identified as enemies were brought for interrogation and torture. As we walked there, I tried to imagine how the prisoners felt, blindfolded, driven through the silent city. The prison’s existence was a closely guarded secret, and so no one sent there was allowed to survive: they would die at the prison or later, at the Killing Fields on Phnom Penh’s outskirts. The city crowds around the prison now: apartment buildings look down into it, and there are restaurants to serve the many people who visit it. Apparently one of these restaurants had a Khmer Rouge theme – with waiters dressed in the cadre’s black uniform, serving the same gruel that the prisoners ate – before the government shut it down.
Tuol Sleng.
Tuol Sleng was a high school before the Khmer Rouge re-purposed it. You can still see the school in the place – the three-storey concrete buildings arranged around a central courtyard, the classrooms running off long balconies; the yellow and white tiled floors; the blackboards. In one of the buildings the cells have been left as they were: on the ground floor, crude walls of brick divide the rooms into cells; the upper floors indicate more forethought, with cells made of panelled wood. One of the things that make the place so chilling is the bureaucratic thoroughness with which it was run. Each prisoner was photographed when he or she arrived, and a file prepared on their background; it was the existence of these detailed records that allowed the prosecution of the prison’s chief interrogator many years later. Many of the rooms now are given over to these photographs: they’re overwhelming in their uniformity of pose (the chair in which the photos were taken is also displayed; a vice is mounted on the back to hold people’s heads straight), their variety of expression (some are openly terrified, others defiant; some have a placid, helpful expression, as if by co-operating with the authorities they might hope for release), and their sheer numbers. The women all have the haircut mandated by the Khmer Rouge: cut short, parted in the middle. The photos of children are perhaps the most upsetting: when someone was brought to Tuol Sleng their whole family was killed along with them, to eliminate the possibility of revenge.
The prison system (there were many of them across the country) was a machine that fed itself. Prisoners were forced to confess to being foreign spies, and then to name their collaborators. Under terrible duress, the prisoners would confess to anything, name everyone they knew as a traitor to the regime. The people they named were duly rounded up and named everyone they knew in turn. Some of the instruments of torture the Khmer Rouge employed are displayed at Tuol Sleng: a diagonal bed to which prisoners were shackled; a bath in which they were submerged. A medical program ran in tandem to the interrogations: people were drained of their blood for use in transfusions. There’s a shrine in which the skulls of some of the victims are displayed, the violence done to them still visible in the surface of the bone. There’s a steadily mounting sense of horror to the place. Here the ghosts are not those of absence but the ghosts of terror and violence.
Tuol Sleng.
Sitting out in the courtyard was one of Tuol Sleng’s few survivors. Chum Mey was allowed to live because he possessed skills useful to his gaolers: he was good at fixing machines. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978, and drove the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979; Chum Mey escaped in the resulting confusion. Now he sits in the place in which he was a prisoner, sharing his experience with visitors, making sure it’s not forgotten. My limited Khmer only allowed me to greet and thank him; even in English I’m not sure I could communicate how I admire his courage in returning to the prison – he’s there several times a week – and the warmth and wholeness that he radiates, the possibility of healing that he represents. It’s hardly possible to forget the Khmer Rouge era – between the executions and people starving in the fields they managed to kill two million people (or a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time) – but I admire too the way the government acknowledges and memorialises the past at these prominent sites in the capital. The government’s relationship to that era is complicated; many in the ruling party (including the Prime Minister, Hun Sen) were members of the Khmer Rouge, and it has not always co-operated in bringing the worst perpetrators to trial. Any attempt to address the Khmer Rouge era can only be limited and symbolic, however, given the sheer number of people they killed. Tuol Sleng is a very potent symbol.
Later we took a tuk-tuk out to the Killing Fields. This was the execution ground for the prisoners at Tuol Sleng once they had confessed and informed on their associates. The work of imagination and empathy is harder there; local people stripped the buildings for their materials after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and the mass graves, emptied of their occupants, are now gentle hollows in the ground. Except for the stupa memorialising the victims at its centre, it looks like a pockmarked park – paths lined by trees, a pond surrounded by bamboo. An excellent audio tour guided us around the site, explaining the significance of each area, finding the details to make it vivid. The Khmer Rouge executioners played patriotic music at volume to mask the sounds of the killing: at one point one such song played over my headphones, along with the grinding sound of the generators that powered the lights. These were the last sounds that the prisoners heard.
I’ve read criticisms of “dark tourism”: that there’s something distasteful about tourists trooping through concentration camps and execution grounds. Travel is (or should be) an exercise in empathy, in reaching out with thought and feeling to unfamiliar places and people. I think a sense of the Khmer Rouge era is basic to any understanding of Cambodia. In a larger sense too, the twentieth century was the story of experiments with totalitarian government. In Phnom Penh you can see where that leads.
Postcard from Phnom Penh
3
04
King Norodom Sihamoni.
#1 – The Magic Key
Being gay can be a magic key, especially when you’re travelling. The key turns and suddenly you’re meeting people, being invited to things: it can bridge some of the differences between you and people from another culture. You have your sexuality in common, and your sense of living outside the mainstream: that can be enough to build a fast friendship. That’s what happened to us in Phnom Penh.
It took us a while to settle into the Cambodian capital. This was partly due to the travel advisories we’d read, all of which laboured the danger of theft there: we spent our first day in the city with our bags clutched defensively to our sides. It’s grottier than Hanoi, and not as distinctive visually: the Western influence is more pronounced, which makes it look more like other places. That openness to external influence also reflects an environment that’s more relaxed – more liberal – than Vietnam. The Phnom Penh Post publishes criticisms of the government that would be unthinkable in the Vietnamese papers. There’s a vibrant street press: one free paper I picked up had devoted its front page to the experience of transgender people in Phnom Penh. There were art openings and film screenings – a real sense of buzz, of a multiplicity of voices. The visibility of the gay culture stood out to me too: there were bars with rainbow flags displayed unambiguously in their windows. In Vietnam the scene had been almost invisible. Ben and I never felt uncomfortable there, but people’s assumptions about our relationship imposed a certain discretion: the word most often used to describe us was “friends,” that slightly euphemistic term that I associate with my mother’s generation. It was a relief to arrive somewhere where we were recognised as the couple we are.
Our first encounter took place in a trendy café on Street 240. (The streets in Phnom Penh are numbered: even numbers for the streets running east to west, odd for north to south.) There were two people beside us conferring over coffee: they would not have looked out of place in a Melbourne laneway. When Ben and I were leaving, one of them leaned over and handed me his card. He’d opened a laneway bar nearby: he invited us to drop by. We took him up on his invitation: up a winding flight of stairs into a space elegantly furnished with recycled timber. Our host Vithara sat with us all night. He seemed emblematic of the city we were getting to know: its exciting sense of activity, its design sensibility, its hospitality. The bar we were sitting in was not his only enterprise; he also made clothes and was outfitting the shop space below to sell them in. The meeting we’d witnessed that morning was about a second bar he’s opening around the corner. Later, a middle-aged Swiss man came in and sat at the bar. Hans had been living in Cambodia for five years: expats seem more common than tourists in Phnom Penh, which changes the way they inhabit the city. (You’re as likely to see a Westerner riding to work in a suit as walking around with a camera.) We’d been afforded a glimpse into everyday Phnom Penh, and it was thanks to the magic key.
The next morning we discovered how small the city is. (Phnom Penh’s a city of about 2.2 million people, making it a little larger than Perth.) We went out to breakfast at a café on Street 136, and it turned out our barista Kosal (who prides himself on the elaborate drawings he makes in the milk froth on his coffees) was Hans’ partner of almost five years. On the strength of this coincidence he invited us out to dinner. Later that night, Kosal and Hans showed up on their motorbikes outside our hotel, and we rode through the warm night to a restaurant near the Independence Monument. At dinner Kosal told us about his childhood in the countryside; like Vithara, he moved into the city to make a living. Hans told us that our hotel used to be an apartment building: he lived in it when he first moved to Cambodia. (We worked out that our room used to be his kitchen.) We’d only spent three days in Phnom Penh, and already we’d met more people socially than we had in three weeks in Vietnam. The easy, expansive welcome we encountered was especially noticeable after the more matter-of-fact manners of the Vietnamese: it seemed to be typical of the Khmer people. (I quickly learned to how to say I’m well in Khmer because in Cambodia people actually ask you how you are.)
Cambodia is emphatically a kingdom. The reign of the last king, Norodom Sihanouk, spanned the first 50 years of the country’s independence: he was its prime political force until the coup that overthrew him in 1970, and he returned to the throne in 1993. In many shops and homes you still see portraits of Sihanouk and his wife, along with Sihamoni, the son who succeeded him in 2004. On one of our nights out, I asked about the special regard that Khmers seem to have for their rulers. The guy we were chatting to was about our age; he was frankly ambivalent about Norodom Sihamoni. The king, he implied, is gay, and came to the throne only reluctantly. Sihamoni is (for a monarch) conspicuously single; his father said of him that he “loves women as his sisters”. (Prior to his death, Sihanouk came out in support of gay marriage.) Before he was summoned to the throne, Sihamoni studied dance and film; later he lived in Paris, working as a dance instructor. I thought the guy’s ambivalence was interesting: the possibility that the king was gay wasn’t cause for identification, but rather a sense of disappointment. It reminded me of the way some people used to talk about Ian Thorpe before he came out: sure he must be gay, frustrated because he wasn’t upfront about it. (Ben thought it was the king’s reluctance to rule that disappointed him: the fact that he served his people only unwillingly.) I found the idea of a reluctant, artistic prince being thrust into power quite touching.
Soon afterwards, an ocker Australian man came over and introduced himself. He was a farmer from remote South Australia, he said, in the closet at home; until recently he’d been responsible for the care of his ailing mother. He’s spending a year now travelling the globe. In his sixties, he’s travelling like a backpacker in his twenties: with rough good humour he described his border crossing from Thailand on the bus. Now here he was in this unpretentious gay bar in Phnom Penh, introducing himself to everyone in turn, looking forward to his stay in a “men’s resort” in Siem Reap. In some ways his story was much like the king’s: duty at home, a measure of freedom abroad. The magic key is not always liberating; sometimes it can lock you in.
Postcard from Hue and Hoi An
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The tomb of Nguyen emperor Khai Dinh.
#4 – Old Things
Vietnam’s coastline runs almost 3,500km from north to south, and for much of its history it’s been split into distinct entities. One of the achievements of the Nguyen Dynasty, which came to power in 1802, was that it managed to unite Vietnam in a single state. Their moment was only brief; France began its conquest of Vietnam in 1859, and by 1882 the Nguyens were reduced to ceremonial status in the new French colony. Their seat of power was Hue (rhymes with sway), a river port about midway down the coast, and they left some impressive monuments in their capital.
At least one of those monuments is impressive in inverse proportions to the emperor who built it. Khai Dinh held the throne for nine years, from 1916-25; he’s remembered mainly for his compliance (and identification) with his French masters. In photos he has the self-conscious air of someone striking poses: the forms of authority have become empty ceremony. It was the practice of the Nguyen emperors to build a grand tomb outside of Hue; those of the earlier rulers Minh Mang (who ruled 1820-41) and Tu Duc (1847-1883) have a gracious, contemplative air, set amongst parkland, pavilions and ornamental lakes. Despite his lack of any real power, Khai Dinh set out to build a tomb much grander and more imposing than those of his predecessors. (A special tax was levied on the peasantry to fund it.) The earlier tombs are set in gently undulating country beside the Perfume River, with designs that draw you inward through a series of temples and courtyards. Khai Dinh’s tomb is set at the top of a steep hill, up several long flights of stairs: it looms over the landscape. The temple that houses his remains is reminiscent of Versailles, with its glass doors and non-stop ornamentation. It’s fabulous – the walls are decorated with intricate mosaics depicting an Arcadia of grottos and bamboo and storks – but (again like Versailles) the opulence is exhausting and finally offensive. In an anteroom the emperor’s gilded French dinnerware is displayed in glass cases: it’s a fascinating case study in how someone can so identify with his masters that he ends up adopting their aesthetics and manners. It made me think too about the way a thing can be valued simply because it’s old. What value does this over-the-top monument to an underwhelming man really have – except as a cautionary reminder of imperial excess? Is that reason enough to preserve it?
Imperial dress-ups at the Hue Citadel.
The palace where the Nguyen emperors lived and worked is in the centre of Hue. A moat and walls 20 metres thick surround the Imperial City; the complex is fronted by a great square citadel. It hulks low against the horizon, relying on mass rather than height for its impact. It’s a very blunt statement of power. Much of the palace was destroyed during the war with the Americans (the 17th parallel was just north of Hue); walking around it now, it requires a leap of imagination to picture it in its prime. Sometimes all that’s left of a building is its foundation; grass carpets what used to be the empress’ quarters. Parts of the Imperial City are being restored, but the wreckage has its own eloquence: it testifies to the violence Vietnam has endured in the years since the last emperor’s abdication in 1945. It dramatises the gap between then – with its ranks of mandarins and palanquins and strict protocol – and now, power asserted and surrendered. But it’s precisely time’s indifference to these relics – the neglect they’ve fallen into – that makes them so expressive. How then should we treat old things? Should we coddle them when their historical moment is past, or let time’s depredations take their course?
Hoi An.
I found myself thinking again about the value of old things in Hoi An, a little town 140km south of Hue. Hoi An was an important sea port until the 19th century, when its position was usurped by nearby Danang. For hundreds of years it was a place where merchants from China, Japan and even further abroad congregated, and the town has meticulously preserved the buildings they left behind. It looks gorgeous in photographs – coloured lanterns slung across the street at night, candles floating in paper boats down the river. It was gorgeous in life too, but I found myself rebelling against its beauty. One of the things I valued about Hanoi was its utter indifference to our presence: we were absorbed into its flow, free to observe it going about its business. Even the Old Quarter, where most of the hotels are concentrated, was densely populated with locals. The Ancient Town in Hoi An was the sort of stage-lit, coercive experience I dislike when travelling: it felt like an entry in the World Showcase at Disney’s Epcot Centre. (“Welcome to ‘Vietnam’!”) Everything is held up for you to admire (and buy): there’s only one way to experience it. The streets were swept clean (a true anomaly in Vietnam); the locals have ceded the old centre to restaurants and tailors. There’s no lived centre to the place: it exists to sell things to tourists. It’s much like The Rocks in Sydney, which trades on its age while filling its venerable sandstone buildings with shops selling clip-on koalas. Part of me wanted the whole place bulldozed and replaced with something with a little more grit and vitality. Luckily, we were staying a short distance out of town, where there was more of an everyday rhythm.
Ms. Vy.
The highlight of our time in Hoi An was a cooking class we did with Trinh Diem Vy, who owns four restaurants around town. Sitting down to lunch at Morning Glory, I was struck by the menus, which described the cultural significance of each dish and combined ingredients with palpable care and forethought. (One of Ms. Vy’s restaurants serves as her “thinking kitchen”.) I read it cover to cover. We enrolled in a class on the strength of it (and the meal that followed): Ms. Vy was every bit as impressive in person. She conceives of herself as an ambassador for Vietnamese food; in Australia she would be a TV chef, but Ms. Vy seems to prefer to work in her town, as part of her community. She taught us about some of the regional differences in Vietnam (people in the south of the country prefer their food sweet); about the lingering effects of the ration system (each family received a monthly ration of rice and sweet potato, and grew what they could on the side; meat is reserved for special occasions); about the health effects of various ingredients. She told us too about a trip she made to Melbourne when she was first going into business to get to know the tourist market. She learned that “Australians spend a lot of money on coffee and cake”: acting on this insight, she opened a restaurant concentrating on these things. I thought of her later when we visited a museum devoted to ceramics: historians use plates and bowls to map the interaction of cultures hundreds of years ago. Vietnamese ceramics ended up as far abroad as Cairo. In their glass cases these bowls were not much to look at, but they testified to a different sort of history to the pomp of the Nguyens: the movement of goods around the globe, the meeting of different groups of people in the marketplace. Ms. Vy is carrying on the same work in Hoi An today. The culture she represents is not bound up in old things; it’s a living tradition that she helps transmit.
Postcard from Hanoi #3
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The waiting boats at Tam Coc.
#3 – Working Landscapes
On our first weekend in Hanoi we drove to Tam Coc, an area south of the city dominated by enormous limestone karsts. The land they spring from is almost entirely flat, and this only makes them more dramatic; there’s no sense of gradual rise, of hills building up to greater heights – only great mounds of rock set down in the middle of rice paddies. The limestone has turned black over time and worn into soft, rounded shapes; gathered on the plain the karsts reminded me of a herd of elephants. A two-hour drive from Hanoi, Tam Coc is a famous pleasure spot: a fleet of rowboats await visitors to take them out into the rice fields and through a series of caves. Ben and I bought our ticket and boarded a boat. There was a man sitting in the back with the oars; he paddled with his feet, the balls of his feet clenched around the oars’ handles. He sat with his weight thrown way back, supporting himself with his hands on the sides of the boat. There were many other people out on the water, but the landscape constrained them to silence: the only sound was the steady plashing of oars in water. Nature spots in Vietnam seem also to be working landscapes: the boats’ path through the water was lined on either side by fields of rice, fenced in by neat rows of bamboo. It contributed to the place’s beauty: the green shoots of rice seemed to knit together the brown water and the towering black rock. White egrets waded through the water and tiny kingfishers with sapphire heads sat on the bamboo. A brilliant red and green snake wriggled through the water beside the boat. After the noise of Hanoi, this quiet landscape was quite magical.
Tam Coc.
This last weekend we took the overnight train to Lao Cai (a town in the north of Vietnam near the border with China) to visit the town of Sapa. Established by the French as a mountain retreat for colonials weary of the Hanoi heat, it’s now a busy tourist centre. You approach it by a winding mountain road; coming into Sapa (which at an elevation of 1500m is a little higher than our home in Blackheath) is a bit like driving along the highway into Katoomba, where the road is suddenly wrapped in great swathes of fog. Sapa is surrounded by land settled by a number of hill tribes. There are 54 different ethnic groups in Vietnam: the dominant Viets (86 percent of the population), who settled the fertile river deltas, and various minorities, many of whom live quite separately from the Viet mainstream and maintain their own language and culture. Ben and I hired a guide to take us out into the land cultivated by the Hmong people. It’s illegal to go trekking around Sapa without a guide (to prevent the hill tribes’ villages being overrun by tourists): it’s one example of how the government here respects and endeavours to protect traditional ways of life. Our guide prided himself on avoiding the usual tourist routes: we set out on a steep path leading through the town’s market gardens into the valley below Sapa.
Sapa.
The fog began to burn off as we walked and gradually we could see further around us. The Hmong arrived in Vietnam only recently – 400 years ago – by which stage the mountains in the country’s northwest were the only land still available. They made the steep slopes suitable for farming by cutting them into terraces. Seen from a distance this victory over the landscape is truly impressive: whole mountains cut into steps, like the face of an enormous pyramid. Their intricacy up close is impressive too: a network of pipes directing water down the slopes; drains cut into the side of paddies to relieve the pressure in times of rain. Animals are allowed to roam about feeding at will. It being spring here, we saw many young litters: complacent sows, their teats sagging almost to the ground, and shy brown piglets that skittered away at our approach; a fiercely protective pair of brown-necked geese, their goslings gathered close; a bitch and her pups napping in the sun. Again, it was a working landscape: it was not yet time for planting rice, but there were women in traditional dress (the Hmong are famous for their skill in weaving hemp) working the village vegetable gardens. It was very beautiful but the beauty was incidental; nearly everything we saw was useful.
A village outside Sapa.
When we’d walked a few hours, on our way to the village of Linh Ho, we could see Sapa perched high on a mountain opposite. I wondered what the town meant to the hill people who lived below in long low houses, practicing agriculture as they have for centuries; what it was like to look up and see that symbol of a life radically different to your own. It could be a threat or a symbol of promise (we passed some Hmong kids listening to pop music on a little transistor radio) or perhaps a matter of indifference. I asked our guide (a Viet) if he thought the Vietnamese government respected the country’s minorities. He said that hill tribes are exempt from the taxes paid by the Viet majority, but that they still have access to services like health and education. Otherwise the government more or less leaves them alone. I couldn’t help but reflect on the situation in Western Australia and how much more respectful of difference the Vietnamese approach seemed; how it implied there was value in other ways of life. Our guide did not mean to praise the government, however. He launched into a diatribe against the hill tribes: their wilful backwardness in refusing to embrace modern agricultural methods; their inability to manage money. It was surprising in a man whose living depends on the people he thinks so little of; a man who held friendly conversations with villagers in their own language. It sounded very much like the complaints of white Australians on talkback radio back home: I grew up listening to similar generalisations about Australia’s indigenous people. Perhaps the contours of prejudice don’t change much from place to place.