Choi Voi (Adrift)

If you don’t expect too much, then everything is simple. If you are simple like me, then nothing’s a problem.
—Duyên (Đỗ Hải Yến)

On her wedding night, Duyên (Đỗ Hải Yến) waits in the attic. Her new husband, Hải (Nguyễn Duy Khoa), is downstairs, tended by his mother and drinking with his friends: they cheer and clap as he downs yet another shot, then collapses, too drunk to walk.

This bit of plot at the start of Choi Voi (Adrift) sets up a familiar emotional dynamic, a struggle involving a young bride, her passive husband, and intimidating mother-in-law. But what’s striking in Chuyên Bui Thac’s film is how you understand the complicated feelings of Duyên, Hải, and his mother. Repeatedly, the camera shows you more than they seem to know about themselves. The first image of Duyên shows her back, a close-up of her unzipping her wedding gown, preparing for Hải’s approach—an approach he never makes. As the camera follows her from a medium distance, she peers at the table below, unable to communicate or even to see very well her young man. Downstairs, Hải’s mother and sister watch him through a doorway, the mother perched in a chair and reflected in a mirror as she refuses to look at her daughter, who worries, “You should stop him, mother. What do we do if he falls over?” The mother sits still, at once agitated and strangely serene, visually blurred. It’s all right, she assures her daughter. “I’ll take care of him.”

In brief, brilliant strokes, cinematographer Ly Thai Dzung reveals what’s unspoken. Though Hải is the focus of all three women here, he’s also unimportant. When his buddy eventually carries him up the ladder to his wedding bed, the women gather round to clean his unconscious form. “Let him sleep,” instructs his mother, eventually leaving Duyên to watch him: again, the camera suggests her sense of things: a low angle on his face slowly rises up to focus on Duyên’s hand reaching toward him and then her face, gazing quietly on her new possession. The next morning in the kitchen, the camera observes from a slightly wide, high angle, as the sister walks in and out and the mother advises Duyên as to his ongoing care and comfort: not too much salt in his meals, no chili, and no expectation of sex after his long days driving a taxi: “Don’t work him too hard.” Duyên’s face is obscured as her mother-in-law hands her precious few bills, what’s left of the wedding gift monies after she’s subtracted what was spent on her son’s party.

Again and again, Choi Voi, which opens 14 January for a week’s run during the Museum of Modern Art’s Global Lens 2010, provides such visual intrigues. Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Prize, the movie shows Duyên’s efforts to see herself as “simple,” even as her circumstances are increasingly and even bafflingly complex. After she’s avoided confrontations with her mother-in-law failed to seduce Hải, Duyên visits her best friend Cầm (Phạm Linh Đan). “You didn’t come to my wedding,” Duyên complains. Cầm’s hand appears in close-up, then the frame slides down to show her lying on her bed. “I’m into funerals, not weddings,” she sighs. Cầm isn’t feeling well: as the friends continue to talk, she appears under a sheet, where she’s seated with a pot of steaming water, a seeming ghost of a past neither girl articulates. Duyên thanks her for the sexy nightgown Cầm gave her as a wedding gift, a gift Hải barely noticed. “When you get divorced,” the sheet rustles, “I’ll give you a more beautiful one.”

As plain as the film makes Cầm’s desire, Duyên remains willfully ignorant, or at least focused on her own desire for a kind of mythical romance. She reimagines Hải for Cầm:  “When I watch him sleeping,” Duyên sighs, “His face is both soft and peaceful like a child’s and his breathing is so pure it’s hard for me to breathe.” She reaches toward Cầm-the-sheet, but they remain apart. Their connection will be made obscurely, when Cầm sends Duyên on an errand, to deliver a letter to Thổ (Johnny Trí Nguyễn), a travel agent and self-styled playboy. Their encounter in the dark shadows of his apartment, a sexual assault that’s simultaneously staged, affected, and disturbing, is rendered in a series of fractured images, obscured and abstracted but visceral too.

As the relations in Choi Voi continue to shift, culminating, sort of, in a boat trip that leaves participants “adrift” but also calculating their liaisons. No one emerges satisfied or even a little bit happier than when the scheming begins. Though Duyên insists repeatedly that she is “simple,” in search of only basic affections and diurnal routines, the film reveals otherwise, that she imagines simplicity to be romantic and fulfilling.

Taken by her grandmother’s diary—in which she has recorded frustrations with and dreams of her own ever-distant husband—Duyên reads passages to Cầm, the language recalling her own description of Hải asleep: “I can’t describe the pinkness and softness of the skin,” she reads, then looks through assorted photos. “I can’t tell which one is my grandfather.” Though men in the film tend to dismiss the women around them (Thổ doesn’t even seem to think about his abuses, a father calls his daughter a “damn whore,” declaring all daughters “useless”), the women find their own escapes.