This 2018 production, Leon Le's first feature-length film, offered a delightfully unexpected addition to my Viet Nam series. 

We both finished it in tears, and we both thought it was one of the best movies we'd seen in a long while.

Set in the Ho Chi Minh City of the 1980s, it is visually exquisite, every frame beautifully composed. The music is wonderful. And the story is very affecting.


The photos in this post were taken on Pulau Galang, Batam, Indonesia, in 2017. They chronicle a parallel Vietnamese experience of the 1980s





Song Lang introduces us to two young men.

Dung is a debt collector, and he's a pretty tough guy. But we see enough to know that he has probably not always been that way, and -- despite the way he brushes off responsibility by saying that debtors have chosen, of their own volition, to take out loans -- he is not utterly impervious to the suffering of those he has to coerce.

The other man, Lihn Phung, is a "cai luong" singer. This is a kind of modern folk opera, which "originated in southern Vietnam in the early 20th century and blossomed in the 1930s under the French colony as theatre for the middle class".

The song lang of the title is a percussion instrument that fulfills some of the roles of a conductor -- controlling the tempo, marking out the phrasing, and identifying the beginning and end of musical sections: "It is the rhythmic foundation for both instrumentalists and performers and is considered the soul of Cai Luong." There's a deeper meaning as well, though, as the song lang also represents "the rhythm of life, which guides the artists down a moral path". And there's a wordplay in the title, too. If you take the two syllables separately, they mean "two men".







Dung and Linh Phung meet when debts need to be collected from the cai luong troupe. It is clear that the theatre sparks many memories for Dung. Eventually we find out that he grew up in this environment, but something in his life irreparably snapped when his mother, a cai luong performer, walked out on both the family and the theatre company. His father, who had played the dan nguyet, the two-stringed, lute-like instrument traditionally used in cai luong, stops playing.

Returning to a cai luong theatre, then, is an emotional experience for Dung. On the one hand he is reminded of the happiest time of his life; on the other, of the pain of abandonment.

Circumstances engineer that the two men spend a few hours together. They play video games; they talk; they play music. It's a short period of time, but they forge a close bond.

When Linh Phung learns that Dung has musical talents, he tries to persuade him to come and audition. Dung suddenly has a glimpse of a different life, with different possibilities. 

But it is not to be...

Linh Phung and Dung are obviously drawn to each other. But nothing is made obvious; it's all in the facial expression and body language. It's amazing how much weight a gaze can carry. Leon Le explains that this mode of portrayal was a very deliberate decision: "The choice to have no physical contact between Dung and Linh Phung has nothing to do with Vietnamese culture or the government’s censorship. In fact, I had to fight very hard with the producers to keep the film the way it is, as they wanted more physical contact between the two characters. In their opinion, the film was not 'gay enough' and the relationship status between the men was 'not clear enough.' I wished to leave the relationship a bit more ambiguous and allow for the audience to decide for themselves."

It's infinitely more moving this way, I think, although unutterably sad...







There are a number of interesting things about this movie, aside from the rich experience of actually watching it.

Le Hoang Anh Tu pays tribute to the care with which the backdrop was recreated: "The filmmakers successfully revive this specific period in Saigon not through a large-scale simulation of the city’s crowded neighbourhoods, but by paying microscopic attention to objects that were used in the everyday lives of Saigonese at that time. People who lived in Saigon during those days will feel nostalgic in seeing again familiar things from their childhoods: Honda motorbikes of the 1960s-series, Nintendo game stations, cassette tapes."

The movie, she says, offers a highly realistic picture of a city in the middle of a raft of transitions: "The film's soundscape crisply portrays the crisscrossing, multiple layers of cultural influences embedded in Saigon at that time. Mornings are filled with songs and speeches from public loudspeakers conveying citizen-making lessons targeting the new socialist city’s dwellers. This upbeat socialism is competed by southerners’ timeless love for melancholic songs, cai luong dramas, and Hong Kong movies -- night-time back alleys are yet infused with pre-war sentimental songs and Vietnamese-dubbed dialogues from Hong Kong martial-art films."





The two main performers are fascinating characters in their own right. Linh Phung is played by Isaac, a singer with a beautiful voice, who trained to master the performance style required in the movie. (Here is a clip of one of his cai luong performances, whereas these three represent his usual style.) He's clearly a talented actor too.

Dung is played by Lien Binh Phat, a first-time actor, who previously worked as a tour guide and MC. He's disarmingly modest: "There's a saying in Vietnamese... 'When you don't know anything you're not scared of anything.'" 





Director Leon Le was born in Ho Chi Minh City, lived close to a cai luong theatre at a time when the art form was experiencing its "second golden era", and longed to be a performer (his parents worried that he would run away and join a troupe). But he moved to the United States with his family at the age of 13, putting paid, he thought, to dreams of stardom. Until, that is, he discovered musical theatre. When he saw Miss Saigon, he thought: "Ooh, American cai luong. Perfect!" So he moved to New York, and pursued a career as a dancer, singer, and actor. 

But the time came when he wanted to tell his own stories, and in Song Lang he was inspired by the character of Nam Cam, a notorious gangster who was passionate about cai luong: "I liked the idea of a gangster who is from a different world but has appreciation for art, and then the art has the power to connect and touch people from all walks of life."

Le's recollections of becoming part of the Vietnamese community are reminiscent of the ethnographic detail of The Sympathizer. He vividly recalls arriving in California's Little Saigon: "'I was like, this is America?' ... He had expected the skyscrapers of New York... Instead, the houses were low to the ground, and everywhere he went, everyone around him was Vietnamese. 'I was just like, I can’t believe we took a 14-hour flight and didn’t go anywhere... This is just like Vietnam.'"

I'm sure we'll be hearing more from Leon Le. In the meantime, the pictures and messages of Song Lang will be hard to forget. Truly, it's hard to recover from childhood loss. It's hard to get back on a good path, once you've started down a bad one. It doesn't do to rely on second chances. And ultimately, so many of our heart's desires will not be fulfilled... But the singer will be a better singer. Art will live on.