Based on a famous novel, Floating Lives is the dream project that the director Nguyen Phan Quang Binh has been harbouring for almost a decade. The director, in fact, already had this adaptation in mind straight after the realization of his debut film Song of the Stork in 2002 (a film that was co-produced with Jonathan Foo, the executive producer of Floating Lives). The complex nature of the conditions of production – shooting took place in the countryside and marshland close to the Mekong delta – and problems caused by the sensitive nature of the content – laws possibly in conflict with the zealous local censorship board – led to a prolonged preparation.
Once it took flight, the project managed to reach greater heights than expected: also thanks to a brilliant cast and to the promotion which followed the presentation at the I Hanoi International Film Festival. The film obtained great local box office results, recording an unwonted success for a film that normally, for Vietnamese standards, would be considered as an ‘auteur’ film and therefore destined for a limited niche audience.
The films opens with a traumatizing scene: the teenager Dien (Vo Thanh Hoa) catches sight of a crowd of women who are brutalising and beating the young Suong (Do Thi Hai Yen), an attractive prostitute who seduced their husbands. The uncontainable violence culminates in the pouring of industrial glue made for glueing steel into the unfortunate young woman’s vagina. Dien intervenes and pretends he has called the police. Suong, who is staggering, therefore has the time to escape and heads to where Dien’s father, Vo (Dustin Nguyen), keeps his boat moored. Helped by Dien’s older sister, Nuong (Ninh Duong Lan Ngoc), she boards the boat and the boat sails away along the Mekong River.
Despite the evident disapproval of the laconic and abrupt Vo, Dien and Nuong take care of Suong, seeing her as a possible substitute to their mother (a cameo of the popular model and TV actress Tang Thanh Ha) who had left them years earlier – and maybe even something more for Dien. After being abandoned by his wife, in fact, Vo set fire to his house and left with his children and the ducks he kept on his boat, in order to lead a nomadic life on the waters of the great Mekong River.
At the precise moment in which Suong joins the family, the bird flu epidemic strikes and the government announces drastic measures that involve the decimation of domesticated poultry and ducks. To protect his only source of income, Vo hurries through the stops during the group’s peregrination along the Mekong, while the tensions and passions inside and outside the boat intensify.
Floating Lives evidently has great ambitions: against the backdrop of a spectacular natural landscape, but detached from the dramas of man, a tragedy unravels that changes tone in accordance with the moments of tenderness, eroticism and brutality. In the end, after the violence explodes in an implacable way, Nguyen Phan Quang Binh reveals the undercurrent of the film: female perseverance and the willingness to forgive and accept one’s destiny lead to a path that brings to reconciliation and serenity, even when faced with life’s greatest sorrows.
Served by productive values superior to the average Vietnamese level, in terms of photography, artistic direction, editing and music, Floating Lives frequently surprises the viewer with its compositional refinement. But it is certainly the intense expressions of the actors that will remain in the viewer’s memory: the action star Dustin Nguyen gives the right connotation of blunt introversion to Vo, Do Thi Hai Yen (known to the Western public as the protagonist of Adrift by Bui Thac Chuyen) knowledgably navigates between determination and fragility in the role of the prostitute Suong, while the actors making their debut, Vo Thanh Hoa and in particular Ninh Duong Lan Ngoc, bring moments of touching truth to their troubled characters.
Paolo Bertolin