2024-04-16 19:46:30
For decades, Hollywood assigned Vietnamese people at most supporting roles in films about the Vietnam War such as Lead Vest, The Deer Hunter or Apocalypse. They showed how the conflict took its toll on Americans. The new espionage miniseries Sympatizant, which can also be seen on Czech HBO Max from Monday, puts Vietnamese people in the spotlight.
According to the AP agency, the seven-part novel oscillates between satire and thriller. It was based on the novel of the same name by the Vietnamese writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and was soon after published in a Czech translation by Karel Makovský.
The book, like the series, follows the fate of an unnamed captain, who is a double agent serving as both an intelligence agent for communist North Vietnam and a secret service for the South Vietnamese regime. With its exponents, after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, he fled to the USA, which supported South Vietnam. Although he lives there among exiles and, for example, establishes a love relationship, he continues to report to the communists and experiences an intense identity crisis. A mixed-race hero in a new environment doesn’t know where he belongs. America “alternately fascinates and repels” him, he says.
The series was created by the Canadian Don McKellar and Chan-uk Pak, the award-winning Korean director of the films Old Boy and Suspect. It was produced by Oscar-winning actor Robert Downey Jr., who plays four evil white men: a CIA agent, an independent filmmaker, a professor of Oriental studies, and a politician.
All these characters are negative and they try to exploit, abuse or dominate the Vietnamese refugee in various ways, similar to when the Western world colonized his country, writes The Hollywood Reporter. “Downey embodies the institutions that together created the conditions for American intervention in Vietnam: Washington paranoia, Cold War militarism, academic racism, and cultural imperialism,” interprets the New Yorker magazine.
Other well-known actors such as Sandra Oh or David Duchovny also have secondary roles in Sympatizant, but most of the protagonists were embodied by Vietnamese people. According to the AP agency, some were hesitant to participate in the project to revive old family traumas. In the end, however, the desire to try to tell the story of the Vietnam War to an American audience with an emphasis on what they themselves consider essential prevailed.
Toan Le plays a Vietnamese general who fled to American exile. | Photo: Hopper Stone
For example, the journalist and filmmaker Phanxinê, who plays the right-hand man of the general of the South Vietnamese regime, kept his participation in the filming of The Sympathizer a secret for as long as possible. He says he tried to avoid controversy at home, because even nearly half a century after the fall of Saigon, Vietnamese media scrutinize every mention of the war.
The book’s draft has already faced criticism in the socialist country for being too friendly towards America. Therefore, some friends discouraged Phanxin from acting in the adaptation. “I spoke to a few people during filming who were really upset about the way the show was portraying the Vietnamese. And I totally get that,” he admits. “Holt will come, what must come,” suggests that he is upfront with the criticism.
The hero’s best friend Bono was played by forty-one-year-old Fred Nguyen Khan. He, in turn, does not rule out that the scenes showing the fall of Saigon may cause trauma in his relatives. “But at the same time, I think it could be a catharsis for them in some way. If we finally started talking about it, maybe the old wounds would heal,” thinks Khan.
He was born in Canada, but during the eight-month filming of the series in Thailand, he improved his Vietnamese so much that he amazed his relatives after his return. “It was a big shift for the better. And as I was surrounded by so many great Vietnamese actors, I found an even deeper connection to Vietnamese culture,” he mentions.
The AP agency writes that although there are also many Vietnamese living in the USA and Canada, they rarely appear in films and TV series. For example, in the 90s of the last century, only the later tragically deceased actress Thuy Trang, who acted in the children’s action series Power Rangers, and Dustin Nguyen, who acted in the Jump Street 21 series, broke into wider awareness.
The first episode of the Sympatizant miniseries is on HBO Max with Czech dubbing and subtitles. | Video: HBO Max
Hollywood has never been able to properly distinguish how differently the people of North and South Vietnam experienced the war, says Long T. Bui, a professor of international studies at the University of California, Irvine. “Sympathizer thus raises double expectations. Not only in the sense that it will be a successful series, but also that it will open the door to more stories about Vietnamese Americans,” he believes.
Journalist and filmmaker Phanxinê also thinks that the Americans have not yet managed to capture the war in Vietnam in a sufficiently plastic way. Some of America’s best-known war pictures, from 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July to the recent Brotherhood of Five, he finds comical. “Americans cannot look at the Vietnam War as the Vietnamese themselves understood it,” he regrets.
And according to him, it’s not just a matter of missing connections. Phanxinê illustrates the misunderstanding with a story from 2008, when he offered a story about a Vietnamese-American woman traveling across the US to a representative of an American film studio. His answer was that he could make such a film only if the heroine was a white American woman.
“It dawned on me that if I wanted to live in America, I would have to make movies about white people,” notes Phanxinê, who wanted to pursue cinematography precisely to pass on his experience. Now, at least indirectly, he can succeed in the role of one of the characters in The Sympathizer, adds the AP agency.
However, initial reactions to the miniseries are mixed. USA Today writes that with Hollywood star Downey, award-winning director Chan-yuk Pak and a Pulitzer Prize-winning script, The Sympathizer had all the makings of a TV Emmy nomination. But it falls short of expectations, it is too complicated, stylized and often boring, criticizes the paper. According to him, viewers will, for example, have trouble understanding different timelines.
The Variety.com server is more neutral and highlights a well-chosen director, while The Hollywood Reporter straight up predicts that Downey will receive an Emmy for his acting performance. The New Yorker magazine thinks that the constant switching between genres between spy thriller, war drama and Hollywood satire hurts an otherwise entertaining and thought-provoking story in many ways.
The American CNN praises some scenes like the fall of Saigon, but according to her, the darkly satirical series does not hold together in the end. And the fact that Downey plays four different characters is also unnecessary. Perhaps this is an allusion to several roles played by Peter Sellers in the famous Cold War satire Dr. Divnolove from 1964. However, in this case, less would be more, according to CNN.