Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

(Bên trong vỏ kén vang)

dir: Phạm Thiên Ân

2023

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a perfect example of so-called “slow cinema”, in that it goes for over three hours(!), and unfurls itself at what one would call an unhurried pace. Since it’s so long, and because so much of the screen time has nothing to do with what the plot seems to be about, it aspires to be about way more than its constituent parts. Perhaps. I don’t know anything for sure.

A young man called Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), wanders around for three hours, pretty confused about what to do with his life. Amidst the wanderings, certain things happen, but the film isn’t about those things: his sister-in-law dies, so he has to take care of her funeral arrangements, look after his 5-year-old nephew Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh), and possibly track down his own brother Tam, who abandoned his family a number of years ago.

So it involves actual things happening, but I doubt it’s about those “things”.

I say this with a modicum of confidence, mostly because I’ve watched the film the whole way through, and because I went back and watched the beginning again just to make sure.

Just because all the actors involved are non-professional doesn’t mean it’s a documentary, even though there are actual scenes where I am pretty sure the person being asked questions about their lives is answering with info from their own lives. Also, the times when people talk directly to camera is a bit of a giveaway that they’re not pros.

I still hope they got paid, though. It is so hard to describe how this flick goes about telling its story, because while I can describe the skill with which particular long scenes are filmed, or the ways that people are framed / composed, often in windows, doorways, all sorts of actual physical frames, or the abundance of remarkably beautiful shots that couldn’t have been planned, I cannot really tell you how it all ties in to the themes of the film.

The shortcoming is mine, not the people who made the flick. It is clearly, unambiguously about faith, not in a specific deity or religion (despite the surprising abundance of Catholic imagery), and yet it is somewhat at least about the main character’s ambiguous relationship with having some kind of faith, and kind of faith that something matters more than just our time on earth.

The film starts with a group of three friends, one of them being Thiện, having a bunch of beers at an open air bar, as a World Cup game is screened in the background somewhere. Apparently Croatia were doing really well in that match.

Of the friends chatting, one of them is saying that he’s developed deep feelings of religious or spiritual faith, and that he plans to get rid of most of his possessions, and that he’s going to go up to the mountains in the north to live in greater harmony either with nature or his faith, or maybe both. He isn’t doing the majority of the talking. There’s a disbelieving chap trying to pick apart what he sees as his friend’s idiocy, deriding his friend for being so open to superstitious nonsense, asks for his Playstation, but also tells him he’ll be back when the money runs out, like everyone does who has these same impulses.

He then asks Thiện what he thinks, and he says he doesn’t know. He says, obviously in Vietnamese, “I want to believe, but I can’t. I’ve tried searching for it many times, but my mind won’t let me believe.” This answer also brings derision, but they’re interrupted by a loud crashing sound, as two scooters collide nearby, killing some of the passengers.

One dies, one is severely wounded, and a child riding pillion walks away unscathed.

The friends are shook up, and for whatever reason decide to go to a bathhouse with saunas, in a country that is often an open air sauna, but you got to do something before your massage. It is pointed out that in what happened, what they observed, there is no logic or seemingly divine purpose: bad shit happens, sometimes some people are really lucky. Someone keeps trying to call Thiện on his mobile, which he keeps ignoring during a progressively more awkward massage that points towards an ending that might be happy, and then he finally takes the call – his sister-in-law has died, and he needs to look after her son, his nephew.

This all takes veritable ages. I won’t say that it happens in “real time”, but all of it, most of it, we get to see and ride along for.

And when he’s collected his nephew, and made arrangements, we finally get a title screen with those amazing words splashed yellowly across the screen. Thiện (as do we) and his nephew ride in the vehicle with the coffin, out of Saigon, back to the village from where they all came from, presumably. It is there where the contrast begins with Thiện’s life in the city, and the life he’s left behind, if only temporarily. The film shows parts of the funeral, and how this version of Vietnamese / Catholic death rites are carried out here.

It’s kinda interesting. The funeral seems to go over a number of days, although I wasn’t sure if it was meant to imply that, or they just filmed when they could. After a particular mass, and after Thiện fields a million questions from his nephew Đạo, who is too young to really understand what’s going on, and doesn’t understand why he can’t his mother again, there is a long scene of them riding to a particular man’s hut, the man who sewed the deceased’s funeral shroud.

He refuses to take any money for it, but Thiện is asked by one of his relatives to insist, and to slip him 2 million dong. Now I don’t claim to know what the conversion rate would be, but I would guess that it’s probably not as much money as it sounds (I looked it up - it’s about $161 in Aussie dollars).

The old man, and he is old, refuses flat out. He may have nothing, but he needs nothing, and refuses to be paid for his good work because it is his gift to the family, for being a part of their community, and for them having lost a loved one.

He then starts telling the story of his life, as the camera, which in this scene has changed position many times, from atop a scooter down a path to in front of the shack, through the shack, spinning slowly in a panorama shot, in one long, unbroken, unedited scene.

It’s bravura work, but it doesn’t call attention to itself, because you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it specifically. Which I was, because I am crazy.

When he speaks of being trained back in the day by the army during the war, I though “okay, here we go”, but unlike what I suspected, the chap was trained by the South Vietnamese as a medic, so he doesn’t brag about killing GIs as a member of the VC. He speaks of the battles he lived through, fought in, saved lives in, and I don’t think it’s scripted. It feels like it’s just history.

I don’t know what the story means to Thiện, but the chap speaks of a wound he suffered, and invites Thiện to place his hand on or in the scar from decades ago.

I am no theologian, but considering all the statues of the Virgin Mary and crucifixes around, it’s pretty much a clear reference to Doubting Thomas being invited to place his hand within the wounds of the recently resurrected Christ.

So that would make Thiện the Thomas who has his many doubts. Everywhere he goes, everywhere the story meanders, people indifferently show him kindness, and help him for no material reasons, even down to one guy on a scooter helping him when his breaks down, and another set of people in another tiny town repairing his scooter for no charge and moving on when night falls, without payment.

When Thiện finds a school run by nuns who can look after his nephew for a while, though it could be for the foreseeable future, he is mildly surprised when the mother superior doesn’t charge him, but draws no inferences from it any further than how convenient it is for him.

The whole while he is traversing natural spaces, mostly, that are incredibly verdant, incredibly fertile and abundant, with clouds of butterflies in so many locations, surrounded by tree covered mountains; the red earth contrasting so with the green everywhere.

The film makes its point subtly, in that no-one points it out directly to Thiện, no-one articulates it directly, nothing underlines the premise, but it’s pretty hard to ignore what its ultimately, quietly saying.

As a probably crummy example, if I made a film about a guy that was complaining about how thirsty he was, how his luck was so bad that he could not find a drink of cool water anywhere, such was his curse, and I had the chap stumbling around in a freshwater lake of the most crystal clear quality, you would think I was being ironic or taking the piss at the very least. But maybe, also, as the audience’s frustration perhaps builds, we would question why what he isn’t able or ready to see the thing he wants most.

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that something so ultimately Christian in its underpinnings, so nakedly Catholic in its iconography would ordinarily not be something that would resonate with me (at all). And it really doesn’t, not on that level. At no stage, considering how quiet and oblique everything is done for most of its epic length, did it make me regret being the worthless Maltheist that I am, but I connected at least to the hunger the main character had, how lost he felt, how separated from life / human connection / his spirituality he felt. That I felt, that I got a strong sense of, that I got from the way life is contrasted in the village versus in the city.

The film asks “what are we even living for?” and has the courage, or the conviction, not to answer for us. For some characters here, being aware of their own mortality, wanting to live a life worthy of having their immortal soul preserved in some mystical realm, that gives them meaning. And for others, nada.

That’s life. There are two sequences that play out in such a way that you’re not sure when they happened (they clearly happened 5 years ago, but Thiện is wearing the exact same clothes as in the present), and the first flashback explains the strained nature of his interactions with a woman he used to know who became a nun, being Thảo (Nguyễn Thị Trúc Quỳnh), but we learn eventually (through the flashback / dream sequence) that she chose to take her vows rather than pursue a relationship with him. And later, much later, so much later, as Thiện tries to track down his brother Tam, a character mentions that maybe Tam chose to pursue a vocation as a priest (which, you know, that’s pretty shabby form, dude who we never see oops spoiler alert).

In the last sequence, which I only realised after the fact that it was set in the past (what trickery is this?), Thiện seems to decide that it’s all too much, and he’s just going to have a swim in the river. But perhaps it implies that he’s choosing to reconnect himself to the stream of life by immersing himself in those waters, and then there’s the obvious imagery of baptism, perhaps. But perhaps not. There is so much I could be missing in my misunderstanding of almost everything that happens in the flick, expect the dialogue courtesy of the subtitles.

What it all means? Let the viewers decide. I can’t say if it’s a brilliant film, I can’t even say if other people would enjoy it. Given how it’s all put together, I can’t even imagine a Vietnamese audience having the patience to sit through three hours of nature footage and quietly spoken polite people being helpful to each other. But it really worked, for me.

9 times if you believe any of this, you can believe that there are tiny miracles all around us out of 10

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“This world has tempted me for too long.” - Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10399622/