The Beautiful Country by the Norwegian director, Hans
Petter Moland, is a movie where the story does most of the work and
the director seems, for the most part, to be trying to keep out of
its way. Mind you, it’s hard to see quite what else he could have
done, for it is a very powerful story. Moreover, the historical and
political background, not only of the war in Vietnam but of the
twilight world of illegal immigration and the exploitation of
immigrant labor by a particularly nasty set of criminal
entrepreneurs in our own time, also tends to dwarf the film’s human
story and make its characters into mere victims rather than
fully-realized human beings. With so much of what it has to say
already determined by the nature of the material, it is remarkable
that the film is as successful as it is in making us care about its
central figure.
This is Binh (Damien Nguyen), the Vietnamese son of an American
GI father. “He was here one day and then he was gone,” Binh’s
mother, Mai (Chau Thi Kim Xuan), tells him. “Just like that.”
“Killed?” asks Binh.
“He was just gone. It was a hard time for everyone.”
Especially hard, of course, for women like Mai who had borne
children to American fathers whom, after the fall of South Vietnam,
they were unable to contact. Mai and her American were at least
married, and in church. She has the papers to prove it. But this
means nothing to the prejudice of the Vietnamese against children
such as Binh, who has “the face of the enemy.” Such children in
post-war and Communist Vietnam — an estimated 12,000 to 18,000 of
them — were treated as Bui Doi: “less than dust.” Mai had
sent Binh into the country to be raised by relatives and herself
remained in Ho Chi Minh City where at the time the film is set,
1990, she is working as a servant for a rich family. When
circumstances make it necessary for Binh to leave his home in the
country, he goes to the city to find her.
The rich family treat Mai abominably, and Binh finds that he has
a little half brother, Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh), probably the son
of her employer. She finds Binh a job with her in “the big house,”
but an accident soon makes it expedient for him to leave town. Mai
gives him her small savings and bids him take Tam and go to
America. The two thus join the hundreds of thousands of “Boat
People” who fled Vietnam between the late 1970s and early 1990s and
who, if they were not drowned, starved, or murdered by pirates
first, usually ended up behind barbed wire in refugee camps in
Malaysia or Hong Kong. Some eventually made it to America.
Binh’s story, therefore, is already a familiar one, and it is
made more so by becoming a quest for his father — which long
traditions of story-telling have made into a self-explanatory
endeavor requiring little in the way of psychological elucidation.
In addition to these well-traveled narrative pathways, the film
sets down a third. For the various appalling experiences undergone
by Binh and Tam and a young Chinese woman (Bai Ling) they meet in a
Malaysian refugee camp have the look of being in a showcase — like
Beyond Borders, the Angelina Jolie vehicle of a couple of
years ago — designed to impress us with the seriousness of “the
refugee problem.” I’m afraid that all this familiarity rather
overwhelms our attempts to get to know Binh as an individual. He is
a brave and attractive figure, but he seems swept away on these
three powerful narrative currents even more than he is on the
treacherous waters of the South China Sea. He is as much an enigma
at the end as the beginning. There is a similarly one-dimensional
quality to characters played by Tim Roth and Temuera Morrison —
the two most notable bad guys.
The one moment where Binh seems to come alive for us happens
after months of indentured servitude in New York when he learns by
chance of a U.S. government program that would have brought him to
America by air without charge. All his sufferings, in other words,
have been unnecessary. “You lie! You lie!” he shouts, desperately
unwilling to believe it. Later, after Nick Nolte makes a late and
somewhat unsatisfactory appearance as his long-lost father, Binh
tells him, in answer to his question, that he has not had much
trouble effecting their reunion. That remark seems to me to redeem,
in its small way, the whole film, rendering insignificant the
rather formulaic quality of Binh’s trials and tribulations just as
they themselves are redeemed by his recovery of his father.
