If you wanted to know how this movie made me feel, see above

I absolutely love films like this. It’s times like these I wish I knew more about the culture of the characters in the film. This is important to me personally because I like to know whats more culturally based reactions to situations and what is part of a characters design. For example, we are provided with a brief view of Binh’s life before he left for Saigon, a grim half bowl of food on the porch alone and sleeping on a small boat. He is then thrown from this half-life of being told he’s a horrible creature to meeting his mother and brother. After a brief encounter with them (it feels like one day! they got to hang out for one freakin’ day…) Binh is thrown into a whirlwind after the wife of the house he is working in falls and dies. He is sent away with Tam to go to America to find Binh’s father. The very short amount of time they were together really made me feel uncomfortable with the relationship formed. Wouldn’t it take some time to get to know each other over a longer period of time before feeling obligated to help a small boy get out of the country (even though he died anyway T.T)? Is this an obligation to family more of a cultural ideal or is this built into Binh’s character? Or is it just Binh, who has been put down most of his life, experiencing familial love for the first time and feels as though he’s been offered a place in his own world? These are just a couple questions I generated based off of the brief period in the film with Binh’s mother and brother.

I wanted to express my impression of Binh overall. New to the concept of bui doi, I don’t understand the stigma surrounding it within the culture. But from what I can gather from the film, he has been treated poorly all his life. His posture alone tells all, slightly hunched, eyes always looking at the ground. This is exemplified when, in the refugee camp, Binh and Ling have a moment under the broken water pipe where Binh is staring at her feet, and Ling says, “Look at me.” and Binh, continuing to stare at her feet, says, “I am”. I interpret this as all of Binh’s life moments, all his experience with people, he never looked them in the face and his expression of looking is staring at their feet. It’s a really dark thought for me.

The moment when Binh’s brother, Tam, dies on the boat is an incredibly difficult moment for me (anyone sitting next to me knows how I took it. T.T). More to come, but for now…Lunch.

I haven’t even yet seen the trailer for this film yet, but I am aware of the original story of “47 Ronin”. Seeing that Keanu Reeves is in it, I feel like this is going to be a very action based film, which may or may not relate to the original story. I’ve always been quite the pessimist about adaptions, especially those of Western adaptations of Eastern film.

Post-Film Response:

(Please forgive anything inside parentheses, they are my own asides and thoughts without form, grammar or spelling accuracies. Please view them as my own unrelated to the formality of any work I might do this quarter.)

From a casual moviegoer’s standpoint, I really liked this movie. Impressions of a foreign culture, imposed in an understandable way to audiences, coupled with some pretty awesome action scenes and even a little bit of a tragic “Romeo and Juliet”-esque love story, thus film had a little bit for everyone to enjoy. I very much appreciated it’s attempts. The more analytic side of me really did not enjoy this movie. I’d like to start off by asking to forgive my nitpicking. The shogun present in this film is Tokugawa Ieyasu. He was the shogun during the well-known Edo period (also referred to as the Tokugawa period). While this is historically accurate, the costumes in the film are a bit off.  One example of this in particular I noticed, in the background of several scenes we see several women with faces painted white with high painted brows, white powder covered faces, and bright lipstick. This particular style is overwhelmingly reminiscent of Heian fashion. For reference, the Heian period ran from 794 to 1185 A.D., whereas the Edo period ran from 1603 to 1868 A.D. Don’t you think 500 years is quite a long time for fashion to develop? The styles presented in Edo Japan were very different. The costumes where also overwhelmingly off (what was with that turtleneck thing during the wedding ceremony, amirite?). While these weren’t the only continuity errors I noticed, I was willing to take it with a grain of salt and suspend my disbelief for the sake of the film.

My biggest complaint with this Westernized version of the story is its unrealistic nature. Had this story been made eastward, it would have been a very accurate and realistic representation of its original story. The inclusion of supernatural into the story, however, I can sort of understand, as many revered Japanese stories rely on supernatural events to express extreme emotion or the like. Several examples of this can be found in a well known story, called The Tale of Genji, by Shikubu Murasaki.

There are some other subject that could be touched upon here,  referencing particularly Japanese stereotypes, but I’d like to wait until our class discussions and revisit this post at that time.