Indochine and Dien Bien Phu: Theatre of the Imperium, Filmnews, February 1993, 9 In 1967 Chris Markers collaborative

film Far from Vietnam said a lot about the positions from which the French viewed the war that was raging in their former colony. Several documentary poses adopted by a number of political filmmakers, including luminaries Resnais, Ivens and Godard, sought to address the very problem of adopting a political position at least one that might approach praxis on the subject. While the films title says much about this positionality, it is Godards contribution that says it all. Amid requisite scenes of violence and carnage, Godard brings us to his own position, that of a filmmaker who by his very craft is distanced from his subject and who, from the safety of his camera, can tell us only of his relation to that distance. He is avowedly far away and suggests that should we wish to make films about Vietnam, instead of invading them with our own sensibilities we should let them invade us mouthing Che Guevara: we must make two, three, many Vietnams! and see what happens. Some twenty-five years later it seems the French have returned to Vietnam, the distance and Godards backseat prescriptions apparently too much to endure. With an unprecedented budget, huge talent and haute couture, Regis Wargniers Indochine signals that which can best be described as a cinematic and political return of the repressed. Variously billed as a sumptuous romantic epic and a gloriously decorative tale of a world which has ceased to exist, Indochine is emblematic of a cinema bent on redoing Frances colonial nightmare as a soft-focus dream. Seemingly closing Godards critical distance, Wargniers rich, up-close tale is however the return of a subtle and reductive surface which reflects little more than the dashed hopes of a failed empire. These imperial hopes effaced and, one might say, repressed in the gauchiste politic epitomised by the likes of Godard and Marker re-emerge as a dangerous compromise between the repressed ideas and the repressing ones. When Godard exalted Guevara, this wasnt what he had in mind. On the films opening night in Sydney, its director wished to thank the two stars without whom this film could never have been made: one was Catherine Deneuve cool, but beautiful and charming the other was Vietnam, conjured similarly as feminine (represented well enough in Deneuves adopted flower Camille), enigmatic and, it ^would seem, essentially open to this mans endeavours. This countrys openness to foreign film crews - even when, as Wargnier quietly conceded, we have done bad things to them... sometimes - has in recent times become common testimonial to the rectitude of their productions. Artists such as Wargnier neatly forget to acknowledge Vietnams dire economic predicament forged by the American embargo and the World Bank and the political pragmatism that now has this country looking to hard foreign currency and tourism with some favour. In their unfailing patronage, these artists fail to recognise the real cynicism and contempt with which the Vietnamese would greet such apocryphal renderings of their struggle. Indochine is just this a romantic plantation saga that reduces the Vietnamese struggle to the relational vicissitudes of its two stars and the French sailor who comes between them. The story is simple enough. After a lustful dalliance with rubber Baroness, Lili Devries (Deneuve), handsome French lieutenant, Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez) encounters her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille (Lin Dan Pham), with whom he quickly falls in love. Camille, believing her life to have been saved by Jean-Baptiste, is smitten. But it is a love that Lili will not allow. Protective and jealous, she arranges for the Frenchmans posting to the northern frontier and expedites Camilles betrothal to her childhood sweetheart, Minh, a clandestine revolutionary who has just returned from Paris. With a wisdom seemingly beyond his years, Minh encourages Camille to pursue her sailor to the north. Jean-Baptiste, a career sailor and hitherto blind functionary of his regime, is beginning to learn something of its in justices when Camille arrives, exhausted but enlightened after her long march, at her lovers outpost After witnessing atrocities inflicted on her fellow-travellers, Camille murders a French officer. She and Jcan-Baptislc become outlaws, forced by injustice to join the revolution. With prices on their heads they join a travelling theatre troupe, furtively spreading the revolutionary word. They bear a child. They are reunited in the peoples struggle; indeed, as their story is told throughout the countryside, they come to embody the struggle. This compromise is problematic precisely because the populist politics of a film such as Indochine is on the surface not at odds with more analytically and politically cogent renderings of the subject. In fact, the reduction is so effective as to appropriate such analyses, to turn it inside out and return it as a sweeping tableau we are bound to regard as truth. While we are presented with examples of French atrocity without which of course this story could not be read as true they come to us as distorted memories, glimpses we cant be certain of apprehending. The scene where Camilles encroaching awareness of her peoples struggle against the French is crystallised, is a case in point. The peasant family with whom Camille shared food and experiences in her trek north are held bleeding in yokes (as their gangster-like captors wait for the tide and hungry crabs to engulf them). Camille turns, catching only a fleeting glimpse of their horror then

turns away, screaming and struggling before obliterating it in the execution of the French officer. The repressed returns but this time the perpetrators of the atrocity are aberrant, renegade French and a gangster characterised most forcefully by a Corsican in the very human face of Camilles and Jean-Baptistes entreaty. The scene is conjured like a memory the periphery bracketed, only suggested like the sentence above quickly erased and rewritten tightly shot, rapidly cut in the revolutionary actions of the two stars who, like France itself, had been complicit in the atrocity. The scene is constructed as expiatory the French are well aware of the atrocities they inflicted (more than sometimes, as Wargnier would have it) during the period depicted in this film but the repressive power of this memory is more than adequately balanced by the revolutionary torching of a Mandarin wide shot, long take, as the old man is consumed by flames. The same return to these scenes of horror can be glimpsed in all of the American versions of Vietnam, with the same balance of ruthlessness and horror wielded by the revolutionaries, to assist in the blocking of the memory. As Marker would testify in Sunless, Thats how history advances, plugging its memory as one plugs ones ears. But this is symptomatic, clearly all cinema is artifice and, whatever the subject, may be related to the motivations and processes sketched above. The film itself is of interest only insofar as it proffers bigbudget revisionism of French colonial history at a time that would seem politically and economically crucial perhaps now more than ever to former French colonies. It begs serious questions. Pierre Schoendoerffers Dien Bien Phu is a cosy companion piece here. Like Indochine it too attracted a huge budget (largely from the French Ministry of Defense) and, with admittedly somewhat less subtlety, set about rewriting the French position on the subject. Promotion for Dien Men Phu is telling: In effect the director wanted to tell this story of this defeat to put an end to the matter for France. Dien Bien Phu would be very comfortable with the backdrop painted by Indochine. Where the latter spans some twenty years, ending with the Geneva Conference in 1954, Schoendoerffers film tells his story of the fifty-five days of battle that led to the complete destruction of the entrenched camp at Dien Bien Phu, the decisive battle that brought the French to the conference table in Geneva the very next day. These films were made for each other. While Dien Bien Phu pays no lip service to the revolution, it is loaded with subtle and not so subtle excuses for the French civilising mission. The French ranks arc filled with north Africans (like Barthes famous example) lamenting the fall of a nation that offered them a place in the sun. The Corsican gangster in Indochine is cut from the same cloth it is he, Castellani, who vows to avenge the death of his

French superior and who searches the country for our two revolutionary lovers as if we had to be reminded that such thuggery was not of the French blood, or Constitution, but of the decidedly more southern temperament, the ironic separatists who still serve and defend fortress France. When brutality ensues from the French, it is a thuggery born of an individual evil, seemingly disparate from State. Apart from one wcll-mannered and cultured socialist, who likes the French but would prefer them to be in their own country, the Vietnamese in Dien Bien Phu are depleted as a race of wagering, handwringing compradors whose only interest in the outcome of the battle is financial. While this is true of many who plied their trade with the French in the major centres of Indochina, we find in their depiction the grubby face of the revolution. This is also in keeping with American versions of the subject the face of the enemy must be kept at a distance, and, if depicted at all, shown as alien and distorted from The Green Berets to Full Metal Jacket, the enemy is cellular and virulent. (Interestingly, the latter, arguably the best of its genre, depicts the enemy as a sole, deranged female however self-conscious Kubricks characterisation, her threatening significance is not lost in other cinematic ventures on Vietnam.) As the credits close on Dien Bien Phu, we witness extreme long shot, distorted depth-of-field hordes of Vietnamese, faces hidden beneath helmets, overrunning the battlefield like insects. Like the French, we are prepared little for the fact that here die peasants of the Red River delta, mobilised by draconian, French-imposed land policies competed to be chosen for the arduous four hundred kilometre trek to Dien Bien Phu, and that a majority of those were women. Dien Bien Phu has two stars to its credit as well: the fading star of Vietnam itself and the beautiful French violinist playing her last tune in the besieged outpost. But here the stars arc conflated, the French beauty representing all that is worth fighting for, holding out the only hope for some cultural intermarriage. As the battle is about to be lost, she reluctantly leaves Vietnam and the hope of an Empire leaves with her. The conflationary feminine leitmotif is more than apparent in Indochine Lili and Camille, a marriage of cultures, the two faces of Vietnam framed by the hands of their military saviour. In some mimetic play, Jean-Baptiste gently, barely, touching them, moves his hands about the faces of his two women as if to capture some fleeting image of a true homeland. He has his way with both, but differently. His love play with Lili is rough, carnal and lustful, but he will not, cannot commit to her. As for Camille, beyond a kiss, it is barely discernible. He seemingly spoils her virginity without penetration she is deflowered as her culture is touched by Frances colonial power an act invisible but for their progeny, immaculately conceived and baptised by his own fathers gently

framing hands. Jean-Baptiste is the consolidator of two cultures, his son is their embodiment. What appears to us is surface and artifice in the closing of critical distance what comes back to us is a travesty. As Umberto Eco put it: two clichs will make us laugh, but one hundred is bound to move us . . . the utmost banality discloses the possibility of the sublime.

Peter McCarthy University of Technology, Sydney