HEAVEN AND EARTH
A film review by Piaw Na
Copyright 1994 Piaw Na
A review of HEAVEN AND EARTH from a crazy perspective
"Have you heard of HEAVEN AND EARTH?" said my Vietnamese friend (I'll call her "Jane")
"No, what is it about?"
"It's a story about Vietnam, told from the perspective of a Vietnamese woman. I've yet to see an American film about Vietnam told from the point of view of a Vietnamese woman, so I want to see it."
"It sounds interesting...."
"Yeah. The actress isn't a professional actress--I met her once. She's from UC Davies and she dropped out of school for a year to do it."
"Hmm .... It says here that Oliver Stone made the movie--he also made PLATOON, didn't he?"
"Yes. This will be very different...."
And so I went and saw the movie with "Jane." I won't describe the movie for you, since others have and will do so. I won't dissect the plot, or talk about the symbolism.
The first thing we agreed on as we left the movie theatre was that the film should have been in Vietnamese with English subtitles. I'm not Vietnamese, and in spite of having a close Vietnamese friend, am not about to learn Vietnamese, but even though I'm used to listening to English being spoken with a Vietnamese accent, much of the impact of the film was lost as I had to decipher the Vietnamese/English. (I speak English with an accent, too, so this is not and should not be taken as an indictment of the Vietnamese accent.) The inconsistency of the language spoken by the lead actress, for instance, varied according to whether the director wanted her to be "authentic", or "understandable." (As she got angrier, her English got better.) This made it tough, since I missed enough dialog in the film for me to get irritated.
The main problem with the film was that it was telling Le Ly's story. As a memoir, it is well done. But as a story, it felt quite raw, since there was too much to handle. You can't tell a life's story in 3 hours and do it justice. "Jane" said, "it feels raw for you because you don't connect it with reality. You want to see it as a movie--but it's somebody's life story, and it's a pretty common story for Vietnamese. If I were to meet her outside a supermarket, I would have to assume that that was her background, but Americans are too detached from the Vietnamese experience to deal with this as anything other than a movie." I replied, claiming that the movie didn't do her memoir justice, and should have been cut perhaps just before she left Vietnam to lend the story more power. "But that wouldn't tell you the point of the story, which was that she truly was in-between, like the Vietnamese. We didn't know, even after the war, whether siding with the Americans was right or siding with the Viet-Cong was right. We were just fighting for our lives." It would have been just another "lived happily ever after" movie instead, I guess, so it wasn't a good thing, either.
We agreed that because of the format, the narration varied between lyrical and prosaic, and that lent an unreal feeling to the movie.
And so we came to the conclusion that the movie couldn't have been improved except by extending it to maybe five hours or making a mini-series on TV instead. But it's still worth seeing on the big screen, as many of the shots would lose their impact on videotape. We paid matinee prices for it, but that wasn't a deliberate act, and I would have gotten my money's worth even at full price.
This was a long movie. So be prepared to leave the theatre tired.
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