In the past weeks, I started to invest more time delving into vietnamese media beyond the typical Vietnamese musical videos, reality tv shows, and games shows. Over the past week, my partner and I have been watching and discussing said Vietnamese filmography. We’ve watched a total of 2 movies, all of which starred Vietnamese actors as well as actresses and produced in Vietnam. We watched each movie twice. Both times the movies are played using their Vietnamese audio track, but the first time we had Vietnamese subtitles (I’m a visual learner, and I typically watch movies with subtitles to aid my understanding), and the second time we watched with English subtitles. So the first watch was supposed to be an immersive Vietnamese experience, whereas the second was to see how much of the dialogue I understood and retained from the first time watch. Afterward, we would discuss the movie in detail (i.e. Logan would ask me specific questions pertaining to the movie and I would have to give a satisfactory answer before we move on).
The first one we watched was Hai Phượng [haːj˧˧ fɨəŋ˨˩˨]; the film is named after the main character’s name, but the film’s English title is known as Furie. We found the movie off of Netflix and both of us decided to give the movie watch since it is extremely rare that we find any Vietnamese content directly on a mainstream streaming site. The movie was an action and martial arts film that centered around the kidnapping and trafficking of a child (Mai) from a village in the Mekong. Mai’s mother was a former gang member who decided to settle down in an obscure village by the Mekong region to protect her family. Mai was abducted by an organ trafficking gang and was brought to Hồ Chí Minh city. After we watched the film, we decided to look it up and found that this movie broke the record for highest-grossing Vietnamese film in history and was highly regarded for its martial arts sequence.
Next we watched Mắt Biếc [mak˧˥ ɓiək˧˥], known internationally by its English title, Dreamy Eyes. This was a slice of life, drama, and romance film. It told the story of a young man, Ngân, one sided love for his childhood companion, Hà Lân. It dealt with a lot of heavy and hard to understand topics like longing and loss that comes with unrequited love. The ending was bittersweet when the main character was forced to move on from his decade long crush. This movie was hard to follow mostly because of its poetic language.
The biggest obstacle I had to deal with while watching these films was verbal comprehension. The moving pictures and plot for both movies were nothing extraordinary or complicated, but some of the actresses and actors use a central dialect or have a northern accent that is almost incomprehensible to me. Luckily, the subtitles were somewhat helpful with my understanding. Whatever I absolutely could not comprehend, my partner was able to step in and help fill in until I completely understood.
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