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IndochineandDien Bien Phu: Theatre of the Imperium, Filmnews, February 1993, 9

In 1967 Chris Markers collaborative film Far fromVietnamsaid a lot about the positions from which theFrench viewed the war that was raging in their

former colony. Several documentary poses adoptedby a number of political filmmakers, includingluminaries Resnais, Ivens and Godard, sought toaddress the very problem of adopting a politicalposition at least one that might approach praxis

on the subject. While the films title says muchabout this positionality, it is Godards contributionthat says it all. Amid requisite scenes of violence andcarnage, Godard brings us to his own position, thatof a filmmaker who by his very craft is distancedfrom his subject and who, from the safety of hiscamera, can tell us only of his relation to thatdistance. He is avowedly far away and suggests thatshould we wish to make films about Vietnam, insteadof invading them with our own sensibilities weshould let them invade us mouthing Che Guevara:we must make two, three, many Vietnams! andsee what happens.

Some twenty-five years later it seems the French havereturned to Vietnam, the distance and Godardsbackseat prescriptions apparently too much toendure. With an unprecedented budget, huge talentand haute couture, Regis Wargniers Indochine signalsthat which can best be described as a cinematic andpolitical return of the repressed. Variously billed asa sumptuous romantic epic and a gloriously

decorative tale of a world which has ceased to exist,Indochine is emblematic of a cinema bent on redoingFrances colonial nightmare as a soft-focus dream.Seemingly closing Godards critical distance,

Wargniers rich, up-close tale is however the return ofa subtle and reductive surface which reflects littlemore than the dashed hopes of a failed empire. Theseimperial hopes effaced and, one might say,repressed in the gauchiste politic epitomised by thelikes of Godard and Marker re-emerge as adangerous compromise between the repressed ideasand the repressing ones. When Godard exaltedGuevara, this wasnt what he had in mind.

On the films opening night in Sydney, its directorwished to thank the two stars without whom thisfilm could never have been made: one was CatherineDeneuve cool, but beautiful and charming theother was Vietnam, conjured similarly as feminine(represented well enough in Deneuves adoptedflower Camille), enigmatic and, it ^would seem,essentially open to this mans endeavours. Thiscountrys openness to foreign film crews - even

when, as Wargnier quietly conceded, we have donebad things to them... sometimes - has in recent timesbecome common testimonial to the rectitude of their

productions. Artists such as Wargnier neatly forgetto acknowledge Vietnams dire economicpredicament forged by the American embargo

and the World Bank and the political pragmatismthat now has this country looking to hard foreigncurrency and tourism with some favour. In their

unfailing patronage, these artists fail to recognise thereal cynicism and contempt with which theVietnamese would greet such apocryphal renderingsof their struggle.

Indochine is just this a romantic plantation sagathat reduces the Vietnamese struggle to the relational

vicissitudes of its two stars and the French sailorwho comes between them. The story is simpleenough. After a lustful dalliance with rubberBaroness, Lili Devries (Deneuve), handsome Frenchlieutenant, Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez) encountersher adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille (Lin DanPham), 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 theFrenchmans posting to the northern frontier andexpedites Camilles betrothal to her childhoodsweetheart, Minh, a clandestine revolutionary whohas just returned from Paris. With a wisdomseemingly beyond his years, Minh encourages Camilleto pursue her sailor to the north. Jean-Baptiste, acareer sailor and hitherto blind functionary of hisregime, is beginning to learn something of its injustices when Camille arrives, exhausted butenlightened after her long march, at her lovers

outpost After witnessing atrocities inflicted on herfellow-travellers, Camille murders a French officer.She and Jcan-Baptislc become outlaws, forced byinjustice to join the revolution. With prices on theirheads they join a travelling theatre troupe, furtivelyspreading the revolutionary word. They bear a child.

They are reunited in the peoples struggle; indeed, astheir story is told throughout the countryside, theycome to embody the struggle.

This compromise is problematic precisely becausethe populist politics of a film such as Indochine is onthe surface not at odds with more analytically and

politically cogent renderings of the subject. In fact,the reduction is so effective as to appropriate suchanalyses, to turn it inside out and return it as asweeping tableau we are bound to regard as truth.

While we are presented with examples of Frenchatrocity without which of course this story couldnot be read as true they come to us as distortedmemories, glimpses we cant be certain ofapprehending. The scene where Camillesencroaching awareness of her peoples struggleagainst the French is crystallised, is a case in point.

The peasant family with whom Camille shared foodand experiences in her trek north are held bleeding in

yokes (as their gangster-like captors wait for the tideand hungry crabs to engulf them). Camille turns,catching only a fleeting glimpse of their horror then

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turns away, screaming and struggling beforeobliterating it in the execution of the French officer.The repressed returns but this time the perpetratorsof the atrocity are aberrant, renegade French and agangster characterised most forcefully by aCorsican in the very human face of Camilles and

Jean-Baptistes entreaty. The scene is conjured like amemory the periphery bracketed, only suggestedlike the sentence above quickly erased andrewritten tightly shot, rapidly cut in therevolutionary actions of the two stars who, likeFrance itself, had been complicit in the atrocity. Thescene is constructed as expiatory the French arewell aware of the atrocities they inflicted (more thansometimes, as Wargnier would have it) during theperiod depicted in this film but the repressivepower of this memory is more than adequatelybalanced by the revolutionary torching of a Mandarin wide shot, long take, as the old man is consumedby flames. The same return to these scenes of horrorcan be glimpsed in all of the American versions ofVietnam, with the same balance of ruthlessness andhorror wielded by the revolutionaries, to assist in theblocking of the memory. As Marker would testify inSunless, Thats how history advances, pluggingits memory as one plugs ones ears.

But this is symptomatic, clearly all cinema is artificeand, whatever the subject, may be related to themotivations and processes sketched above. The filmitself is of interest only insofar as it proffers big-budget revisionism of French colonial history at atime that would seem politically and economically

crucial perhaps now more than ever to formerFrench colonies. It begs serious questions.

Pierre Schoendoerffers Dien Bien Phu is a cosycompanion piece here. Like Indochineit too attracted ahuge budget (largely from the French Ministry ofDefense) and, with admittedly somewhat lesssubtlety, set about rewriting the French position onthe subject. Promotion for Dien Men Phuis telling: Ineffect the director wanted to tell this story of thisdefeat to put an end to the matter for France. DienBien Phu would be very comfortable with thebackdrop painted byIndochine. Where the latter spans

some twenty years, ending with the GenevaConference in 1954, Schoendoerffers film tells hisstory of the fifty-five days of battle that led to thecomplete destruction of the entrenched camp at DienBien Phu, the decisive battle that brought the Frenchto the conference table in Geneva the very next day.

These films were made for each other. While DienBien Phu pays no lip service to the revolution, it isloaded with subtle and not so subtle excuses for theFrench civilising mission. The French ranks arcfilled with north Africans (like Barthes famousexample) lamenting the fall of a nation that offered

them a place in the sun. The Corsican gangster inIndochine 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 forour two revolutionary lovers as if we had to bereminded that such thuggery was not of the Frenchblood, or Constitution, but of the decidedly moresouthern temperament, the ironic separatists who stillserve and defend fortress France. When brutality

ensues from the French, it is a thuggery born of anindividual evil, seemingly disparate from State.

Apart from one wcll-mannered and cultured socialist,who likes the French but would prefer them to be intheir own country, the Vietnamese in Dien Bien Phuare depleted as a race of wagering, handwringingcompradors whose only interest in the outcome ofthe battle is financial. While this is true of many whoplied their trade with the French in the major centresof Indochina, we find in their depiction the grubbyface of the revolution. This is also in keeping withAmerican versions of the subject the face of theenemy must be kept at a distance, and, if depicted atall, shown as alien and distorted from The GreenBerets to Full Metal Jacket, the enemy is cellular andvirulent. (Interestingly, the latter, arguably the best ofits genre, depicts the enemy as a sole, derangedfemale however self-conscious Kubrickscharacterisation, her threatening significance is notlost in other cinematic ventures on Vietnam.)

As the credits close on Dien Bien Phu, we witness extreme long shot, distorted depth-of-field hordesof Vietnamese, faces hidden beneath helmets,overrunning the battlefield like insects. L ike theFrench, we are prepared little for the fact that here

die peasants of the Red River delta, mobilised bydraconian, French-imposed land policies competedto be chosen for the arduous four hundred kilometretrek to Dien Bien Phu, and that a majority of thosewere women. Dien Bien Phu has two stars to itscredit as well: the fading star of Vietnam itself andthe beautiful French violinist playing her last tune inthe besieged outpost. But here the stars arcconflated, the French beauty representing all that isworth f ighting for, holding out the only hope forsome cultural intermarriage. As the battle is about tobe lost, she reluctantly leaves Vietnam and the hopeof an Empire leaves with her.

The conflationary feminine leitmotif is more thanapparent in Indochine Lili and Camille, a marriageof cultures, the two faces of Vietnam framed by thehands of their military saviour. In some mimetic play,Jean-Baptiste gently, barely, touching them, moveshis hands about the faces of his two women as if tocapture some fleeting image of a true homeland.He has his way with both, but differently. His loveplay with Lili is rough, carnal and lustful, but he willnot, cannot commit to her. As for Camille, beyond akiss, it is barely discernible. He seemingly spoils hervirginity without penetration she is deflowered as

her culture is touched by Frances colonial power an act invisible but for their progeny, immaculatelyconceived and baptised by his own fathers gently

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framing hands. Jean-Baptiste is the consolidator oftwo cultures, his son is their embodiment.

What appears to us is surface and artifice in theclosing of critical distance what comes back to us is atravesty. 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 thesublime.

Peter McCarthyUniversity of Technology, Sydney