July 28-August 3, 2005

movies

DRIFTERS AWAKE: Bai Ling (left) and Damien Nguyen make their way to the new world.

Dusted

A child of the Vietnam War fights his way to America, and finds more struggle.

by Cindy Fuchs

The Beautiful Country

"I've been to your country," Captain Oh (Tim Roth) tells Binh (Damien Nguyen). "Both of your countries. You will always be out of place wherever you go. And poor." Binh nods and bows his head, used to being called ugly, different and doomed. In rural Vietnam, where he has grown up, he is called "bui doi" (translating as "less than dust"). Alone and afraid, he is also determined.

Binh is caught between times and places, son of a Vietnamese mother he has never known and a long-gone American GI, literally standing out (too tall) among his Vietnamese fellows, decried for having "the face of the enemy." In 1990, as Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland's The Beautiful Country begins, he has developed precise skills (fishing by hand) and survival instincts (nodding and bowing his head when confronted). On learning that his mother, Mai (Chau Thi Kim Xuan), works in the "big city," Binh leaves his foster parents and rides his bike to Saigon. Here he finds Mai, essentially indentured to a wealthy family, enduring verbal insults from Mrs. Hoa (Anh Thu) and sexual abuse from her son (Khuong Duc Thuan). When Mai arranges for Binh to work as a houseboy, he's at once horrified, embarrassed and paralyzed by the son's flagrant license.

Here, as elsewhere, the film reveals Binh's experience in lyrical, subtle, often extraordinary imagery (recalling the work of producer Terrence Malick). As Binh scrubs the foyer floor, Stuart Dryburgh's camera shoots at a sharp angle, looking across the room from his scrub brush up to his mother, standing to dust a table. The son walks between them, cutting across the space as he approaches Mai, initially appearing only as feet (Binh's head-down view), then fully in frame by the time he casually and cruelly grabs at Mai's bottom.

When a sudden and too-opportune accident forces Binh to leave his mother, she sends him with her much-younger son by Hoa, Tam (Tran Dang Quoc Thinh), to find Binh's father. The two get on a boat bound for America, equipped with only a bit of cash and Mai's marriage certificate, which has scribbled on the back the Houston address of the nearly mythic GI, Steve (Nick Nolte). Less hopeful than desperate, Binh decides to believe the stories he's heard, that America is a beautiful country, and that he will be able to support himself and his half brother once they arrive.

Of course, they can have no idea of the hardships entailed in this journey. Their boat lands them on the shores of Malaysia, where they're locked up in a refugee camp, again between places, lost in a legal limbo, without control of their fates. Here Tam befriends a scrappy Chinese prostitute, Ling (Bai Ling), who provides Binh with a predictable conflict: He yearns for her, wants to save her and also feels shame for her, as he watches her traipse, red-lipped and mini-skirted, from the guards' barracks back to her bunk with the rest of the refugees. Their eventual escape and transport on Captain Oh's ship reveals still more of the hypocrisies that order the refugees' world, as they huddle in the hold, starving amid filth and stormy disarray. Advised that they should stay healthy in order to earn the transporter (Temuera Morrison) top dollar ("You'll all be rich in America," he lies), they wage contests for water and wormy rice, based on the ability to list American products: Clint Eastwood, the NBA, Folgers coffee.

Having signed papers that consign them to work off their passage once they arrive in New York City, the new illegal immigrants follow strict routines: Binh again keeps his head down as he shuffles from his Chinatown restaurant job, where he throws out platefuls of uneaten food, to his underground bunk every night, while Ling sings at a karaoke bar, turning tricks with odious Caucasians in suits. Again, Binh's inclined to rescue her, but she feels so lost at this point that she can only reject his affection. "I'm ugly, too," she says, as they stand surrounded by NYC traffic, her fake leather fringe jacket and gaudy jewelry flashing in the neon lights.

Despondent, Binh plays cards with his bunkmates, the TV in the background conveniently running Gordon Gekko's "Greed Is Good" speech at the very moment they let slip that Binh actually has legal rights as a child of a U.S. soldier. That is, he came by way of the horrific ship voyage when he would have been afforded free air transport to the States. But the realization of his exploitation by any number of men during his travels incites Binh to take off in search of his father.

At once metaphorical and brutal, their meeting reveals the reasons for Steve's abandonment, but also the continuing costs of war — the Vietnam War in particular, others certainly. Literally blind, Steve embodies U.S. lapses and longings, political and moral missteps, and the guilt that both drives and undermines all efforts to do right.

The Beautiful Country Directed by Hans Petter Moland A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended