Pauline Chan's 'Traps' shows another Vietnam
Pauline Chan's 'Traps' shows another Vietnam
By Matthew Lewis
SINGAPORE (Reuter): Pauline Chan thinks most movies about Vietnam have somehow got it wrong -- which is one reason why she made her own.
Chan, director of the award-winning Vietnam film Traps, escaped from the country as a teenager in 1973 after an eight- month kidnapping by the Viet Cong.
When she finally returned to her homeland 20 years later, it was to direct her first feature-length film. Traps was released last year in Australia to glowing reviews.
"I longed to go back for many years, but it felt too painful to even contemplate," Chan told Reuters. "But with the film I felt there's a purpose, a reason that gave me strength to actually go back and confront the ghost."
The Sydney-based director was in Singapore recently to attend the film's regional premiere.
The 96-minute Traps has won awards in Australia and France. It will be released later this year in Japan, North America and Brazil, said Chan.
Traps is about an English couple who visit a French-owned rubber plantation in 1950s colonial Indochina. There they become embroiled in the personal, sexual and political tensions of their hosts. It has been called daring and provocative, with powerfully realistic sex scenes.
One Australian reviewer wrote of Traps: "Rarely has there been a film... which captures such a visceral sense of tropical lassitude and sexual effusion."
Chan set Traps in the 1950s because expatriate women characters in colonial times were central to her story. She wanted to show Vietnam through a few "personal, everyday lives" rather than through battle scenes and global politics.
Previous Vietnam movies were "basically very romantic or nostalgic versions of what the westerners see of the Vietnam War", said Chan.
She said that in some ways a female director is better equipped to probe characters' internal struggles than a male.
"Women are more sensitive, more interested in personal relationships and personal journeys through a dilemma like war or disaster."
The half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese Chan turned to movies naturally. Her great uncle was Wu Chu-fang, whom she describes as the Humphrey Bogart of the Chinese film industry 40 years ago. Her mother was a stage actress.
After escaping from Vietnam in the 1970s, Chan wound up acting in Hong Kong movies. It was an experience she loathed. "You feel you're just a vehicle for the producers and directors to get rich, and all the female roles are full of cliches."
Chan eventually decided to study film in Los Angeles and Australia. Two of her short films were shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Asked about her influences, she cites Roman Polanski's early films and Akira Kurosawa. "I have many heroes in the black and white, Chinese and Japanese era, but I think Kurosawa would be my idol."
Chan is proud that Traps was the first English-language drama the Vietnamese authorities allowed to be filmed in the country.
"It's like a dream of many, many years coming true, for my first full-length drama to be shot in my homeland. I felt very proud, but at the same time, scared and emotional, and quite sad about the past."
Chan, who is 3O-ish, did not learn English until university. She says she considers herself Australian but that emotionally she is still an Asian.
She is wary of being typecast as an ethnic Asian director and says she is now writing her next project about "sexual relationships in the '90s", set in Australia.
She has no ambition to make big-budget movies in the United States. "I have been offered projects to do in America, but I haven't found anything that's appealing to me. My key interest is the story first. As a filmmaker you go wherever the story takes you."