Hoa-Binh

"Among the critic's obligations is the salvaging of neglected films before they go softly into that dark night." Vernon Young, On Film

Though the French had been in contact with Vietnam as early as the 17th century, they were in control of the country, along with Cambodia and Laos, during the years 1887 to 1954. 

From 1945, Raoul Coutard served in the French Far East Expeditionary Corps in Indochina. On his release from service he stayed in Vietnam for 11 years, working as a war photographer and later for the magazines Paris Match and for Look. He also documented in his photography the natural beauty of the country and the lives of villagers. He made a pact with a colleague, Pierre Schoendoerffer, that whichever of them broke into movies first would bring the other on board. So in 1958, Schoendoerffer invited Coutard to Afghanistan where he was filming La Passe du Diable. Never having operated a film camera before, Coutard went along thinking he would be shooting production stills. Instead he found himself the film’s principal cinematographer. When his work on the finished film was nominated for a film festival award, the film’s producer asked him to shoot his next project, A bout du souffle, directed a young man named Jean-Luc Godard. 

As the premier cinematographer of the French New Wave, Coutard worked closely with Truffaut on his second and third films, both of which are among his best. But it was for Godard that Coutard employed a strikingly spare and mobile approach to camerawork in more than a dozen of his films. In 1968, he had a falling out with them both (though he would patch things up with Godard), and he moved on to make his first film, called Hoa Binh. In Vietnamese it means “Peace.” 

When shooting began in 1969, the American war on the Vietnamese was in its fourth year. The American troop presence was at its peak, 549,000. But, of course, Coutard’s film isn’t about Americans. They stand rather prominently in the background of some scenes. Their war planes fly overhead, their tanks and armored vehicles appear in one scene. In an opening montage, helicopters known as “Hugheys” fly in a formation that likely inspired a similar shot in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Gunfire can be heard in Saigon at night. In another scene, the only things we see of some Americans are their enormous feet when Vietnamese boys scramble to shine their shoes. 

The story, based on the 1954 novel The Colony of Ashes by Françoise Lorrain, is disarmingly simple. We are introduced to a Vietnamese family in South Vietnam, a man and wife and their two children. We see the father (played by Le Quynh) who is a “cyclo” driver (a Vietnamese pedicab) in the film’s opening scenes. But he tells his wife (the gracious Xuan Ha) he must leave, removes his hat and hangs it on the wall. Only later do we learn that he has gone to join the Viet Cong. 

The mother manages to support her children, named Hung and Xuan, but she nurses a sore knee, and her condition doesn’t improve when a fire drives them from their home all the way on foot to Saigon where a cousin grudgingly takes them in. The mother is told by a nurse (Danièle Delorme, the sole professional actor in the film) that she needs to be hospitalized for the treatment of her knee, but she tells the nurse it is impossible. Working all day, the mother is awakened at night along with everyone else in the area and forced by armed members of the Viet Cong to destroy a part of the road constructed by the Americans. At dawn, a column of American armored vehicles arrives, accompanied by South Vietnamese soldiers, and drives the VC away. The children swamp the jeeps in which American soldiers hand them candy and smile. But when the armored column leaves the same crowd of children find a dead body - a local man in league, presumably, with the VC. 

Her condition deteriorating, the mother tells Hung (Phi Lan) to fetch help from the clinic. An ambulance comes, and the nurse informs the woman’s cousin that she won’t survive and gives her some money to help her with the children. The mother’s last words to Hung are “My dear little boy, you’ll learn very quickly that life is cruel. When you were born, there was light and happiness. I remember it very well. Now you must try to convey this to Xuan. There’s only Xuan and you. You have to take good care of her. Try to always hold onto happiness. Never give up hope.” Hung never sees his mother again. 

Despite the money from the nurse, the mother’s cousin treats Hung and Xuan with hostility. So Hung decides to take his sister and try to survive in the streets of Saigon. Now wearing his father's hat, he takes the little girl everywhere with him, and manages to make enough money, delivering papers and shining shoes. (Coutard must have been inspired by De Sica’s film Shoeshine, that touches on a similar theme of homeless children’s survival in a city wrecked by war.)

Following Hung and Xuan by day and night in Saigon, a laconic American song called “Firefight” is sung by Bill Ellis on the soundtrack. 

You flip your iron to rock’n’roll

And squeeze the trigger to let ‘er go

It gets so hot you can’t hold on

And by this time Charlie‘s gone. 

Meanwhile Hung’s father is granted leave by his Viet Cong superior to visit his family while also delivering a message to clandestine fighters in Saigon. He discovers their house was destroyed and the cousin, who fears his return will bring nothing but trouble, angrily tells him that his wife is dead and his children are lost. He goes to the infirmary where his daughter has by now been taken in. The nurse recognizes him and shows him to Xuan. Waiting outside the gates, he sees his son approaching, still wearing his hat. He runs into his father’s arms. 

When Hoa-Binh was shown in New York, an enthusiastic John Simon wrote:

“‘Hoa Binh’ should be seen by everyone, but especially by those who don’t want to see it. They should come and be surprised, for they will leave, I promise them, filled with gratitude.”

Not everyone who should’ve seen this remarkable film, including every American citizen, did so. Very few people, in fact, bothered to see it, despite its being awarded the Prix Jean Vigo at Cannes and getting a nomination for Best Foreign-Language Academy Award in 1971. (Elio Petri’s much flashier Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion won the award.) 

Seeing it 50 years hence, Hoa-Binh possesses striking qualities, not least of which are its images, in living color, of a small, hot Southeast Asian country and its people engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the enormous military hardware of the world’s most powerful country. I thought of how an American veteran of the war might experience some thrill of recognition at Coutard’s shots of Saigon. But then, such memories as our GIs brought home from that war are probably of what happened to them on R&R, in the girlie bars that dotted the tenderloin districts, on the perimeter of American outposts. 

Unavoidably, but only incidentally, Coutard includes almost identical speeches, from an American and from a North Vietnamese soldier, about each party’s resolve to outlast the other, even if it were to take another 10 years. It took only 5. The word “innocent” when applied to the real victims of war, the “collateral damage” – the ones who get in the way of fighting armies – certainly applies to Hung, his mother and little sister. 

Coutard worked with mostly non-professional actors, and though his inexperience is apparent at some moments, which is nothing but the choices of certain inexpressive faces, at least he doesn’t call on his actors to do more, to be more, than themselves – Vietnamese people caught up in a monstrously destructive war. At this deceptively simple task, he succeeded superlatively. For their humanity alone, they, like the film itself, more than make up for their simplicity of means. I’ve seen all the American attempts to make sense (as if there is any sense to be made) of the Vietnam War, everything from John Wayne’s ridiculous The Green Berets to Peter Davis’s documentary Hearts and Minds to Oliver Stone’s brilliant Born on the Fourth of July. Raoul Coutard’s Hoa-Binh is the defining masterpiece of the war because it gets closest to its subject than any American film could ever get.