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."