# C03 Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
That Vietnamese movie has won the «camera d'or» award in Cannes Film Festival in 2023. It's an award for the best first film of a director (here, Pham Thien An) . The original title is Bên trong vo kén vàng (the same meaning in english) and the french title is «L'arbre aux papillons d'or» (the tree of the golden butterflies!!). What a mysterious title...for a film that talks about the meaning of life, the faith, … The hero, «Thien (Le Phong Vu) must transport the body of his sister-in-law, who died in a motorcycle accident in Saigon (HCMC), and her five-year-old son Dao, who survived the crash, to their countryside village. In rural Vietnam, spectres of his own youth, of his brother, who has left to rebuild his life elsewhere, and of the war also await him.»
The first scene of the film gives the tempo. Thien is talking with two friends about spirituality and meaning of life, religion (very important in the film). The three men are in a bar during a football world cup and nothing seems to disturb them. They are filmed in a single-shot sequence with a fixed camera. The whole movie uses many long single takes. Sometimes it's for symbolism, with a fixed shot of an object (a little bird, a clock...). We are very far from the western cinema with fast cuts, short shots and camera movements. For such a subject, it's a very good way to make the viewer think about what he's watching. I know that many people don't go to the cinema for that but I love that kind of cinema. It's very contemplative, and not far from some famous Chinese / Taiwanese directors... Pham Tien An is a self-educated director, fan of Theo Angelopoulos, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, AndreÎ Tarkovski...If you like some of these directors, you'll love this film.
This movie is a bit autobiographical… and describes the search for faith in the Vietnamese youth. It's something common to other young people in the world but for one for one of the dragons of south-east Asia, it's a kind of taboo. Pham Thien An doesn't show the Vietnam like a modern country with more and more technology as you can see sometimes on documentary, or on VTV4, the official TV channel. It's the rural Vietnam I know, in the less touristy parts of the country. Thien lives in a small apartment in Saigon. It's very noisy, very damp and warm. Not the life he dreamed of. He makes wedding films (like the director before...) and goes to «massage» saloon. The accident is like a time machine for him. For us, it's also the opportunity to discover magnificent landscapes with mountain roads, misty valleys, rice fields, … and the hard-life in the countryside. One of the best sequences of the movie is the meeting with Mr Luu, an old man who has lived through the war ...and who talks about why he fought (I
'll let you guess which side).
Between flashbacks, dream sequences and a kind of road movie, this movie is full of great moments...But it's a long movie (2h58), so far from what we expect in Cinema, nowadays. It was not boring at all for me and if sometimes I look at my watch in the middle of a shorter movie, this time, I only looked at it in the last 10 minutes. Apart from the excellent cinematography, the music is very minimalist, with just a few arpeggios of classical guitar. Silence is more important....Some sequences have no sound at all. Dialogue is very rare but precious. For a first movie, it's a very ambitious film with some shortcomings but it's the kind of film you will love or hate. It's not a masterpiece but what a good first attempt.
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