It is hard to imagine the film Cu Li Never Cries (Cu Li Không Bao Gio Khóc) in colour, although director Pham Ngoc Lan’s feature debut was intended to be colourful. However, an accident involving the lead actor delayed the production by several months, resulting in the loss of some funding. Lan was thereafter forced to reduce the budget and shoot the film in black and white.
As is often the case in art, the limitations worked out for the movie. The beautiful and elegant cinematography (by three people: Linh Dan Nguyen Phan, Nguyen Vinh Phuc, and Vu Hoang Trieu) perfectly match the slow pace of the story and create a melancholic atmosphere that is in tune with the film’s central theme of the past confronting the present.
Cu Li Never Cries begins with Mrs. Nguyen (Minh Chau) returning to her homeland. She has brought with her an urn containing the ashes of her long-estranged husband, an engineer whom the socialist authorities of the German Democratic Republic sent to Vietnam years ago to help build a hydroelectric power plant. Mrs. Nguyen left with him for Europe, where she lived a long time, and now she can’t seem to find a place for herself in contemporary Hanoi. She lives with her niece, Vân (Lê Thị Hà Phương), but they don’t get along. Vân is pregnant, and she and her boyfriend Quang (Xuân An) are preparing a hasty wedding, although they are uncertain of their feelings and anxious about the future. In addition to the urn, Ms Nguyen has also brought home with her the titular cu li, or pygmy slow loris, whose sad, fearful gaze seems to offer the best commentary on what transpires on screen: a longing for the past and a fear of the future.
The only place where Mrs. Nguyen seems comfortable is a dance club for senior citizens, where she develops a friendship with a young waiter (Hoàng Hà). The boy does not treat his job as a nuisance; on the contrary, he has a special gift for forging bonds with the elderly, although his platinum-dyed hair shows that he hasn’t lost touch with his youthful reality. He will eventually reject what might be regarded as Mrs. Nguyen’s advances, because he has no intention of being a remedy for her loneliness and spleen. He will become neither a son, nor a lover, nor a surrogate for a lost youth.
The nostalgic tone of Cu Li Never Cries is at its strongest in the sequence showing Mrs. Nguyen’s visit to the hydroelectric plant where she met her husband. Hypnotic shots of agitated water are interspersed with scenes of workers meeting and singing upbeat communist songs celebrating Hồ Chí Minh. It is here where Mrs. Nguyen will finally realise that chasing the past is pointless.
Which is not to say that a bright future awaits. The last part of the film depicts Vân and Quang’s wedding. However, one searches in vain for a mood of carefree fun. The wedding song, sung a capella by the groom, sounds doleful, even pathetic. But maybe that’s just how life is: not very exciting, full of compromises, filled with regrets and doubts, played out between black and white, on a grey scale. Only occasionally we’ll experience a brief moment of joy and happiness. I wonder what our cu li thinks about this?
Lan has managed to conjure a world in which we can immerse ourselves completely, even if a cultural barrier separates us from Vietnamese realities. The characters evoke our sympathy and tenderness, but never pity. Vân is a person with a disability, but no one around her comments on this fact, and at no point is it presented as a problem. The film cultivates an interpersonal bond, allows us to understand that others also feel the same existential anxieties we do. Cu Li is not able to eliminate these anxieties, but it certainly has a soothing effect. As the director explained in an interview, “cu li” is also the Vietnamese name for the hairy fern Cibotium barometz, which is used in Eastern medicine as a cure for persistent back and bone pain.
Lan would not have achieved his goals if he had made the film a sorrowful, funeral procession. Meanwhile, the film’s nostalgic aura is offset by humour, evident, for example, in the scene of the inadvertent hitting of the urn from which Mrs. Nguyen’s husband’s ashes spill, or Vân and Quang’s pre-wedding photo session in a field of sunflowers and in a crowd of other brides and grooms. All these qualities led us to unanimously award Cu Li Never Cries the FIPRESCI prize at the the Festival du nouveau cinema festival de Montreal.
Bartosz Zurawiecki
Edited by José Teodoro
© FIPRESCI 2024