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Le Bao (Vietnam, 1990), a self-taught filmmaker, started out with shorts such as
Coal and Scent and rose to prominence with his first feature-length film, Vi/ Taste (2021), a collaboration with Singapore and Toronto-based producer Lai Weijie, a cryptic and almost
abstract visual poem photographed by Vinc Phuc Nguyen in a
near-silent cinematic style.
As metaphors accumulate with no explanation, the film is perhaps too long.
The film silently introduces us to Bassley, a Nigerian man who limps around in a bandaged leg and keeps thinking of football. He lives in the slums of Vietnam.
Then we are silently introduced to four middle-aged Vietnamese women.
They all works silently at preparing food and other chores. One woman performs some kind of magic placing a slug on Bassley's penis.
The women inflate a giant hot-air balloon inside an otherwise empty warehouse.
Two Vietnamese doctors examine (or, better, measure) Bassley and other African men, and those are the first words we hear (19 minutes into the film).
A doctor tells Bassley that he cannot stay on the football team.
A woman washes a dog, waist-deep in the waters by derelict homes on stilts.
She then rows her boat to one of the homes.
Bassley is staring silently at a boy.
Bassley in a barber shop,
Bassley sweeping the floor,
Bassley washing counters,
Bassley scrubbing the floor with a woman,... and finally we hear Bassley speak
as he tells a transfixed woman of the fateful night when his father died and the family moved to the new house that father built for them.
We see a woman rowing the boat back to her house and carrying a pig into the house.
Bassley and the women bring food inside and lay it on the table.
Bassley weighs the pig while the women stare.
Bassley even assists the women when they bath naked (and one pees squatting next to them) and dries their hair with a hairdryer.
They live in a space with no furniture other than some simple bunk beds.
Bassley massages one of the women, both naked.
All five are naked as they prepare food together.
Bassley and a woman (both still naked) carrying a swordfish and chasing the pig up the stairs.
Then the pig keeps moving while the humans stand still like in a photograph.
We see three of the women in the foreground (all naked) while in a distant corner Blassey is having sexual intercourse with the fourth one.
The three watch television sitting on one of the bunk beds.
Blassey tells a woman that he has a son in Nigeria, that he joined a football club in Vietnam, that they want him to go back home now that he's injured.
They all watch television naked, with the TV set simply laid on the floor.
Blassey meditates aloud about the first time he masturbated.
They seem to try anything to fight boredom:
three women ride the motorcycle inside the room with the bunk beds, followed
by Blassey riding a bicycle and carrying the fourth woman.
Blassey lays a trap for a mouse in front of a hole in the wall.
Finally, they are back doing their chores with their clothes on.
We see Blassey rowing the boat around the houses on stilts.
Then we see him bathing inside while the pig roams the building.
Then we see him relaxing on a deck with the pig on his belly.
Then we see him working on the hair of a woman in another house, the woman
tells the story of how her husband and son disappeared.
We see silent scenes of Blassey with the naked old women.
One kisses him tenderly on the forehead. Another one falls asleep holding his hand.
We then see him in a field walking towards the jungle, and then we see him
in the room of the hot-air balloon, staring at it as it slowly deflates.
And then he rides away on his bicycle.
We finally see him sitting alone on the steps of the football stadium.
And we see a mouse coming out of the hole in the wall but retreating instead
of falling into Blassey's trap.
(Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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