ASIAN ACTORS AND MOVIES - PART 1

 When I set out to discuss Asian films, my naïveté led me into a maze similar to what I encountered when reviewing Latin films, which is that there is so much to know.  Asia stretches across seventeen million miles from Siberia in the north to the Java Sea in the south and is home to over fifty percent of the Earth’s population.  In fact, altogether the area consists of five separate regions Eastern, Central, Southeastern, Western, and Southern.  The East includes China, Japan, and Korea, Central includes countries whose names I can’t even pronounce like Krygyz Republic, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Southeast includes Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, West includes Afghanistan, Egypt, and Palestine, and South includes Nepal, India, and Pakistan.  To complicate matters further, some countries have prolific film industries while others have little to none. 

The Eastern Asian countries that have been producing movies the longest are China and Japan.  They are probably best known for films about the martial arts, with Japan focusing on Samurai soldiers and Karate masters and China producing superstars like Jackie Chan and the incomparable Bruce Lee, but they offer other genres as well.   The Japanese revel in making films with gigantic monsters like Godzilla, referencing the aftermath of the atomic bombs that were dropped in WWII, and creating beautiful romances with tragic endings.  More recently it introduced fans to Manga, animated films that appeal to both children and adults.  For those who want something other than martial arts, China offers movies which investigate the differences between rural and city living, a reflection of the migration that took place when the country transitioned from traditionalism to communism. 

In the Middle East, Egypt got off to a strong start, often producing stories about love and romance.  Due to restrictions primarily guided by religious beliefs, however, films from the area began to encounter a lot of push back and the decades between 1950 and 2000 became a virtual cinematic desert.  Fortunately, movies have begun making a comeback in that region and a few have even won Academy Awards.  Most of the films are documentaries like Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) which won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject in 2019, but there are also good fictional stories, some of which have been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.  These include the 2014 Palestinian production Omar and the 2018 Lebanese film The Insult.  The South Asian country of India has always produced a lot of movies.  Recently the Bollywood style, which often feature actors wearing colorful costumes while singing and dancing to contemporary music, has become really popular since Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2008.  There are quite a few India-made movies available on Amazon but be prepared, it is not unusual for them to run two and a half hours or longer.

Even if I had in-depth knowledge of Asian films, I’d have to write a book to talk about movies from all the countries that encompass the continent.  That’s okay because what I am more interested in is films made for Western audiences.  Thus, for this two-part series I discuss movies that reveal what Americans are told about Asians rather than depicting what they are really like.  For the first installment, I chose Snow Falling on Cedars which scrutinizes the relations between White and Japanese Americans in the shadow of World War II.  Next, I selected The Quiet American which examines the plight of the Vietnamese people when the French colonists, Chinese communists, and Vietnamese nationals vie for control of their country.  

Eastern Asia: Snow Falling on Cedars, 1999 — Japan

In a nutshell, this film is about loss; of love, of dreams, and possibly of hope when the characters realize that fantasy is often counterbalanced by disappointment. The plot is about related events that take place before and after WWII which impact Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke), Hatsue Miyamoto (Yuki Kudo), and her husband Kazuo (Rick Yune).  The movie opens on the small fictional island of San Piedro (Spanish for Saint Stone) which lies off the coast of Washington state.  It is nighttime and a nearly impenetrable fog envelopes a man as he clings to a boat’s mast while trying to free his lantern.  Come morning the fog has lifted, and under a clear sunny sky a group of men hauls in a massive net which coughs up one fish and the corpse of Carl Heine, Jr. (Eric Thal), the man from the mast.  The townspeople are horrified.  Carl grew up in the community, and he, his wife, and small children are well-known and well-liked.  There also is a palpable sadness among residents because their young neighbor recently recouped the family farm which his mother sold after his father died. 

As the townsfolk gather, Ishmael, an investigative reporter for the local San Piedro Review, elbows his way forward, so he can speak with Sheriff Art Moran (Richard Jenkins) who is standing on the dock.  The sheriff states that he suspects Carl was murdered.  When he later learns that the shape of an unusual wound on the victim’s head matches the bloody hook of the boat’s gaff, he arrests Kazuo Miyamoto, a Japanese-American who has a grudge against the Heine family.  Time passes, and summer relentlessly folds into winter before Kazuo’s trial begins.  In temperatures that have plummeted below freezing, an excited crowd mills outside the courthouse under a somber sky congested with clouds that are heavily pregnant with snow.  Just as giant flakes start to fall, Ishmael joins them and when he sees Hatsue go into the courthouse, he hurriedly follows.  He asks to speak with her, but she coolly tells him to, “Go away.” 

At this point Ishmael becomes both an observer of the trial, and the historian who holds the key to what brought this moment about.  In the movie, events constantly morph between the past and present to emphasize how the latter and the former are related, but to make the story easier to follow, I relate the plot chronologically.  There is no question that the town of San Piedro is racially divided between Japanese and whites, both formally and informally.   Japanese immigrants, who earn meager livings either by picking strawberries or fishing, cannot own land nor apply for citizenship.  The likelihood that their children, citizens by birth, will also be hindered is depicted by showing them sitting in a school bus with segregated seating.  In fact, the town only acknowledges the Japanese-American children once a year when one of the girls is chosen as Princess of the Strawberry Festival, an honor that the beautiful Hatsue once enjoyed. 

The only white person in town who publicly criticizes this practice is Ismael’s father Arthur (Sam Shepherd) an intelligent open-minded man who is both owner and editor of the town’s newspaper.  Well-liked and successful, he smooths the path for his taciturn son who has few friends.  Hence, from the start Ishmael and Hatsue differ not only racially and socially, but also economically with him having unlimited prospects thanks to being the child of a well-heeled white family and her chances being limited to being the wife of an ill-regarded man with whom she will bear inferior children.  In fact, Hatsue’s mother Fujiko Imada (Ako) constantly warns her daughter to act like a proper Japanese lady so she will attract a fitting, meaning Japanese, husband. 

Ishmael and Hatsue defy convention, however, and over time develop a forbidden friendship.  As children (Reeve Carney; Anne Suzuki) they secretly play together on the beach, as preteens they sneak away to run through the rain, and as adolescents they clandestinely make-out in the hollow trunk of a massive cedar tree.  Unsurprisingly, the two eventually have sex after which Ishmael asks Hatsue to marry him.  Before she can answer, however, the Japanese Air Force bombs Pearl Harbor starting a chain of catastrophic events that will strongly impact the three principal characters.  Ishmael is drafted and joins the Marines, Hatsue’s father, Hisao Imada (Akira Takayama) is arrested when he fails to report that he keeps dynamite on hand to clear tree stumps, all San Piedro residents of Japanese descent are transported to the Manzanar Interment camp in the Southern California desert, and Kazuo’s father misses two payments on land he is buying from his landlord Carl Heine, Sr. (Daniel von Bargen).   This lets Mrs. Heine (Celia Watson), a German immigrant who hates her Japanese neighbors, void the contract, after which she sells the entire farm to her white neighbor Ole Jurgenson (Jan Rubes) for a profit. 

When Ishmael learns where Hatsue is, he writes to her.  Unfortunately, her sister Sumiko (Saemi Nakamura) opens the letter and shows it to their mother who forces Hatsue to break up with him.   Since she has already been feeling conflicted about the relationship, Hatsue agreeably writes a Dear John letter which Ishmael receives right before his troop storms Betio beach on Kiribati Island.  The enemy is waiting for them and most of the men are either killed or wounded including Ishmael who loses his left arm.  Back home, Hatsue has little difficulty moving on, and soon falls in love with Kazuo.  The two marry after which he enlists in the army and ends up being shipped overseas.  After the war he and Hatsue move back to San Piedro with their families. 

Meanwhile, Ishmael begins to associate the physical pain from his wound with the emotional agony he suffers from losing his girl.  Eventually, that pain grows into a rage that blackens his entire perception of the Japanese people, and he starts to blame them for his misery.  When he gets out of the marines, he goes to college to study journalism after then he also returns home.  There, he develops a habit of following Hatsue around.  One day as she walks along the beach, he approaches her pleading for her to hold him one last time.  When she refuses, he calls her a damned Jap, and walks away, causing her to quit speaking to him altogether.    

By the time the war is over, Ishmael, Kazuo, and Carl have all lost their fathers.  Ishmael strives to become as good a newspaperman as his dad but feels he is failing.  Kazuo tries to get back the land that his dad was buying only to learn that Mrs. Heine sold it to Ole Jurgenson.  Eventually Ole decides to retire, and Carl, Jr. who has been earning his living fishing, buys the farm back.  Denied what he considers rightfully his, Kazuo, who has also become a fisherman, is bitter over Mrs. Heine’s betrayal.  When he learns that Carl has purchased the farm, he asks his old friend to honor the promise that his mother would not. Because he knows how much she hates the Japanese, however, Carl will only promise to think it over.

Later during the trial, Hatsue testifies that her husband came home the night of Carl’s death excited because they were finally going to get the acreage.  Then, when he is on the stand Kazuo clarifies her assertion, stating that the conversation took place when he found Carl stranded at sea with a dead battery.  Kazuo loaned him one, but it was too large, and Carl had to use his gaff to pare it down.  While doing so, he cut his hand on the hook and it bled quite a bit.  The two men briefly argued about the land, and in the end, Carl agreed to let Kazuo buy it.  Thrilled, he went home to get a spare battery and told his wife the good news. 

As the trial drags on, snow pours from the sky like thick cream, blanketing the landscape and leading the old folks to remark repeatedly that it is the worst blizzard since 1929.  The snowstorm affects Ishmael and the Miyamotos in related ways.  Eschewing warnings that the road conditions are hazardous, Ishmael drives out to the lighthouse to review logs from the night that Carl died, looking to see if anything happened that might explain the man’s death.  He seems to be planning to write an article about the case, perhaps find a way to save Hatsue’s husband.  Yet, when he discovers an entry which states that a large freighter came through the channel around the same time Carl was fishing there, he doesn’t tell Carl’s attorney Nels Gudmundsson (Max von Sydow) who could use it as exculpatory evidence.  Instead, he steals the page and hides it. 

Then one evening he runs into Hatsue and her father stranded alongside the road because their truck slid off and got stuck in the snow.  He picks them up and while he’s driving them home, Hatsue complains that the town is treating her husband unfairly because he is Japanese and criticizes Ishmael for not doing anything to help.  I am going to stop at this point because I don't want to spoil the ending for those who want to watch the film.

Summary

Two powerful metaphors in this story are silence and water.  From the very beginning, fog, rain, and snow, elements that are known to distort sound, envelope the characters.   The fog in the opening scene not only makes it difficult for the audience to understand what Carl is doing, it impacts his senses, contributing to the disaster.  When Ishmael and Hatsue are together in the Cedar tree, the rain is so loud, they have to stand close together to communicate.  Finally, snow, which naturally muffles sound, comes down in such an unprecedented fury that people keep comparing it to the blizzard of 1929, the year that the Great Depression started.  This suggests that the storm, and the trial it accompanies, are the most catastrophic events the island has seen in a quarter of a century.  Kazuo is being railroaded because he is Japanese just as the island is shutting down because of the relentless snow.   

In western culture water generally symbolizes rebirth, as in baptism which washes one’s sins away.  In their youth Ismael’s and Hatsue’s time together is frequently associated with water, they play on the beach, run through the rain, seek refuge from a storm.  Thus, it is no surprise that when the couple finally have sex, it is in the hollow cedar tree where they have so often sheltered during downpours.  The metaphor does not only apply to them, however.  When Carl dies, he drowns in the ocean; when Ishmael sustains the wound that costs him his arm it is in the tides of Betio beach; while Kazuo is on trial the island is being buried under feet of snow. 

These events alert us that the characters will encounter events that will lead to them adopting new definitions of their situations.  Having sex in the same place they spent so much time together as children, for instance, makes Ishmael decide that he wants to be with Hatsue forever, but causes her rethink being with him at all.  She actually admits this in the Dear John letter when she writes, “I loved you and didn’t love you at the same moment.”   To see what other impact water has on the characters, you need to see the movie because I can’t tell you anything more without revealing the ending.

Southeast Asia: The Quiet Man, 2002 — Vietnam

To fully appreciate The Quiet Man, you need to know that the plot comes from a novel by English writer Graham Greene.  In the book, the events take place in 1951, but the 2002 version of the film moves the timeline to the mid-1950s when the French occupation of Vietnam is ending.  The country has a chaotic history of warring factions and families, so it wasn’t until the early 1800s under the Nguyen dynasty, that it finally became a united entity called Vietnam.  It remained so until the French took possession in the 1880s and renamed the entire region Indochina.  They retained the Nguyens as puppet rulers, however, and the family remained in power until 1945 when Emperor Bao Dai Nguyen abdicated the throne and moved to Europe.  It was then that French control of Indochina, which had been relatively stable, began to falter as it came under attack from a communist militia led by Ho Chi Minh.  A Viet citizen who had been radicalized in his youth, Ho named his troops the Viet Minh and, partnered with China.  His army finally succeeded in driving out the French in 1954 when his forces defeated them at the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Up to that point the United States had stayed out of the fracas, but once it appeared that Ho’s takeover would lead to the spread of communism, America stepped in and offered support to Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese leader who was not tied to the Communists.  To help Diem win the presidency, the Americans turned to Trinh Minh The', a self-appointed military leader who had his own troops.  He agreed to have his men carry out bombings in the city of Saigon in exchange for support from the United States.  After he fulfilled his part of the bargain, however he was assassinated.  Nevertheless, the U.S. succeeded in making Diem president by blaming the acts of terrorism on the Communists while at the same time rigging the election.  It is during the midst of these events that The Quiet American takes place.    

Like Vietnam as a whole, Saigon was occupied and influenced by many powers. Originally a humble fishing village, it quickly grew into the unofficial “Paris of the Orient” due to having a natural harbor on the Saigon River that provided easy access to the rich delta lands that produced an abundance of rice.  As the city developed into a major shipping center, it was sought after by various countries including China, Portugal, France, Great Britain, and the United States, greedy suitors that only held it for a short time before being pushed out by someone else.   As each disappointed colonist departed, it left something behind so that Chinese Pagodas stood next to British hotels with guests that enjoyed fine cuisine at upscale French restaurants.  At the same time, the daughters of impoverished peasants, some barely more than girls, survived by prostituting themselves to wealthy foreigners, becoming virtual orphans whose poor but proud families would never welcome them back home.  

 When the movie opens, a middle-aged British journalist, Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) is at the police station being interrogated by French Inspector Vigot (Rade Serbedzija) regarding the death of an American man named Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) whose body was found floating in the Saigon River.  After answering the inspector’s questions, Thomas returns to his apartment where his twenty- year-old live-in girlfriend Phuong (Tai Hai Yen Do) is waiting for him.  Thomas thinks back to the day he met Alden, an employee of the Economic Aide Mission (In the book he is described as a physician, but the film never makes his position clear).  During their conversation, Alden says he is in Indochina to save the eyesight of Vietnamese peasants from the ravages of Trachoma, a highly infectious eye disease which can lead to blindness.  Thomas, however, notices that the young man carries a book entitled The Dangers to Democracy, a fictional treatise written by a non-existent author that Greene created to introduce the young man’s belief that third-party intervention is the only way to save Vietnam from communism. 

The two men hit it off right away.  Alden is familiar with Thomas’ work and Thomas finds Alden’s ideas charmingly naïve.  It turns out that the journalist has more pressing problems than saving Alden from himself, however.   He has only published three articles in the last year, and his boss at The London Times is calling him back home.  The problem is, he doesn’t want to go back to England because that would mean returning to his Catholic wife, who will never give him a divorce, and exchanging the carefree existence he enjoys in Southeast Asia for a restrictive lifestyle that he disdains. 

One popular liberty that Thomas would miss becomes apparent when he and Phuong take Alden out for dinner.  As they pass a bordello, a crowd of young women grab Alden and drag him inside.  Thomas hurries to his rescue, appealing to a hooker he knows for help.  Next, they go to a nearby restaurant where beautiful girls dressed in identical scarlet dresses dance with men for $5 a ticket.  Thomas tells Alden that Phuong was a taxi-dancer when he met her, and the young man, who is already smitten by the beauty, says he will purchase a dance if she will be his partner.  She agrees, and as they move around the dance floor Thomas can’t help comparing his jaded aging persona to that of the guileless young man’s.

It isn’t long before Alden comes to Thomas and says that he wants to marry Phuong.   Ordinarily Thomas would be angry at such hubris, but he really likes his new acquaintance and decides the man is too naïve to know better.  Since he loves Phuong too much to stand in her way, Thomas conveys Alden’s offer, letting her decide what to do.  Believing that Thomas will divorce his wife for her, Phuong says no.  The journalist learns about a battle that is raging between the communists and General The's militia and decides to write a story about it, hoping this will allow him to remain in Vietnam.  He has his aide Hinh wire the newspaper in London requesting permission to pursue the story, and they grant him a month.  Feeling relieved that he has bought some time, Thomas writes to his wife asking for a divorce, then leaves for the north.  When he gets to The's encampment, he scores an interview, but before he can meet with the General, Alden shows up.  When Thomas asks what he’s doing there, Alden replies, “It’s not that easy to remain uninvolved.”  Alden then reiterates that he loves Phuong, and although Thomas is jealous of him, he can’t help but admire the man's earnestness.   

Thomas begins interviewing The' and asks a question that the General finds offensive.  He walks out in a huff and an aide warns Thomas that he is in danger and needs to leave immediately.  Scared, he grabs Alden, and they begin driving back to Saigon.  As they travel, he confides that he cannot let Phuong go because losing her would be the beginning of his death.  Suddenly, the car runs out of gas leaving them stranded in the middle of nowhere with enemies all around.  They seek shelter in a nearby guard’s tower and during the night The's men arrive to burn the car and bomb the tower.  Although the attack injures the guards, Thomas and Alden are unharmed, and they hitch a ride back to town with a military transport the next morning.  When he returns to his apartment, Thomas finds a letter from his wife refusing to release him.  Instead of confessing this to Phuong, he lies and tells her that his wife agreed to the divorce.  He hides the letter beneath his pillow and leaves, but while he is out, Phuong, who was surreptitiously watching him, shows it to her sister (Pham Thi Mai Hoa) who can read English.  When she learns that Thomas is not going to get divorced after all, Phuong leaves him for Alden.

Shortly thereafter, someone explodes a large bomb on a busy street in Saigon killing many people.  Thomas, who happens to be there, sees Alden walk into the middle of the chaos wiping away blood from his pants rather than helping the victims.  Suspicious that the young man is not the humanitarian he pretends to be, Thomas asks Hihn to help him track down a recent shipment that arrived for the Economic Aide Mission. When they locate the boxes, Thomas notes that they contain Diolactun, a substance he has never heard of.  The next time he sees Alden, he asks what the Mission uses the substance for, and the young man says it is a milk-based plastic contained in eyeglass frames.  By doing further research, however, Thomas discovers that the product is also used in explosives. 

He recalls Alden’s dispassionate response to victims of the bombing and the man’s belief that the only way to save Vietnam is through military intervention by a third party.  This leads him to conclude that rather than being a good Samaritan, Alden is actually a CIA agent who is in Vietnam not to save people’s eyesight, but to rid of the country of the French and the Communists.  Thomas goes to the CIA office and, as he expected, Alden is there.  When he accuses Alden of being behind the bombing, the debunked agent righteously counters that sometimes it is necessary to take lives to save lives. 

Hinh’s friends wish to meet Alden, so he asks Thomas to invite the young man to dinner.  Mistrustful of their motives, Thomas asks what they are going to do, and Hinh replies that they will be as gentle as the situation allows.  Even though he knows they probably intend to kill Alden, Thomas complies with the request, not only because he wants Phuong back, but because he knows that as long as the agent remains alive, innocent Vietnamese will die.  Thomas asks Alden to dinner, and he accepts, but when he arrives at the designated meeting place, Hinh and his men are there.  Alden knows they want to kill him, so he tries to escape, but they chase him down, stab him, and throw his body in the river.  Thomas goes to Phuong’s apartment and reveals that Alden is dead and is not at all shocked when she impassively replies that people die every day.  Seeing his chance, Thomas assures Phuong that he will never leave Vietnam or her.  She agrees to come back because she knows that despite him being more worldly than she or Alden, Thomas has an inner core of decency and sincerity that neither of them possesses.       

Summary 

It is clear that the main characters in this story represent the powers that were fighting to control Vietnam in the 1950s, with Thomas being France, Alden being the United States, and Phuong being stuck between them as Vietnam.  As a reporter, Thomas is familiar with how the world works and is well aware that Phuong is using him, but he somehow misreads Alden’s character.  Whether this is due to the man’s youth, or his gender, or that he’s just a good actor is debatable.  Either way, once Thomas realizes Alden is an agent with the CIA, the plot takes on implications not previously evident.  Did Alden and Thomas really meet by accident, or did Alden actually seek him out?  He knows Thomas’ name, has read his work, and is aware that the Vietnamese people respect him.  Thus, the CIA would gain real credibility with the locals by partnering with the journalist.   

Peeling the layers apart and laying them side by side provides an interesting way to study the relationship between Alden and Phuong.  The first layer would contain Alden’s feelings for her.  Has he really fallen in love, merely interested in his own gratification, or see her as a way to get close to the Vietnamese people without having to go through Thomas, who will almost certainly see through his masquerade at some point?  The second layer contains information on how Phuong defines her relationship with Alden.  Does she love him, want to use him to get to the United States, or perceive this deceitfulness which she can use to her advantage?  At one point she tells him a story about a friend of hers who was in love with an American man that promised to take her back to the states with him.  Yet, on the day they were supposed to leave, she waited for hours at the airport only to discover that he was already gone. 

Why did Phuong relay that tale?  Was she begging Alden not to do the same thing to her, or was it her way of saying she didn’t trust him?  Perhaps it was a warning that she will do whatever is necessary to get what she wants.  The third option is a strong possibility because Phuong’s people have a long history of dealing with foreign powers by feigning cooperation while passively resisting.  There is an old Vietnamese saying, “As long as even one blade of Vietnamese grass survives, the people will fight for it.”  Does Phuong plan to make a dupe of Alden to help her country?  Whatever the reason, he ends up paying for his treachery with his life.  Now that he is gone, Thomas will pay whatever he has, including his dignity, to keep her.  The only one who will prevail in the end is Phuong, and she will do so by utilizing the same subdued persistence that her people have employed for centuries.

The movie critics didn't much care for Snow Falling on Cedars (39%), but I liked it a lot.  I not only found it visually beautiful (the Academy nominated it for best cinematography), but enjoyed wondering what happened, how it happened, when it happened, and most importantly, why it happened, but then I like puzzles.  Critics on IMDB didn't care for the film much either, giving it an overall score of 44, but the public enjoyed it, which brought the overall score up to 6.7.  Roger Ebert gave it 3 1/2 out of 4 stars which suggests that you might not be disappointed if you give it a glance.  Currently, it is streaming on the usual services like Prime and Apple TV for $4.   Or you can buy the DVD from the usual places for a few dollars more.

Critics liked the 2002 version of The Quiet American…a lot (87%).  In fact, they enjoyed the film more than the general audience did (72%), which is rare.  On IMDB the metascore is 84, and the overall rating a respectable 7.0.  In fact, the remake scored higher than the 1958 original version (6.8).  Despite how much people liked it, it only received one nomination from the Academy which was for Michael Caine as best actor.  If you have the Paramount channel you can watch it for free, otherwise, you’ll have to pay if you want to watch it.   You can also find the DVD for sale pretty easily but shop around because some places are asking $30 or more. 

Next time I will talk about two more of my favorite movies about Asians.  The first will be The Kite Runner which offers an account from an Afghan refugee who lives in America and must return home.  Finally, I'll look at Audrey Rose which deals with the Hindu concept of reincarnation.  The research and writing will take me a couple of weeks, so you’ll have lots of time to find some Asian films you’d like to watch.  Until then…

Sayōnara and chúc ngủ ngon.