Vũ Ngọc Đãng | Hot boy nổi loạn và câu chuyện về thằng Cười, cô gái điếm và con vịt (Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck) aka Hotboy and Lost in Paradise / 2011, general release 2012

suffering for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vũ Ngọc Đãng and Lương Mạnh Hải (screenplay), Vũ Ngọc Đãng (director) Hot boy nổi loạn và câu chuyện về thằng Cười, cô gái điếm và con vịt (Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck) aka Hotboy and Lost in Paradise / 2011, general release 2012

 

A truly radical shift in how Vietnam cinema has previously portrayed gay individuals, Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 and several other film festivals thereafter, being released under various “safer” and less fascinating names such as Rebellious Hot Boy, Hot Boy, and finally, Lost in Paradise, the latter of which has hardly any significance with regard to the film itself.

   The first title, in fact, reveals its bifurcated story, the one centering on serious issues of male prostitution; the peregrinations of an innocent country boy Khôi (Hồ Vĩnh Khoa) upon his arrival to Ho Chi Minh City after which he his robbed of everything, including his work papers; and a love affair between the manipulative prostitute Đông (Linh Sơn) and his lover Lam (Lương  Mạnh Hải) who are Khôi’s robbers; and later a relationship between Lam and Khôi—and a second, almost unrelated story about a female prostitute Hạnh (played by well-known Vietnam singer Phương Thanh) and a mentally handicapped man Cười (Hiếu Hiền), who hearing a woman using the metaphor to describe old eggs, “you can almost hear the cry of the duck” steals a egg to literally hatch a duckling in the rolls of his undershirt who becomes his pet, almost as if it were a beloved child. 

    Obviously, the gentle and strange story of love between an unknowing grown man and duck is meant to counterbalance the more violent aspects of the issues of prostitution, robbery, and later physical attacks that are portrayed in Vũ Ngọc Đãng’s film. But one wishes that he had been able to more deeply entwine the two, not just narratively, but in the metaphorical sense, both representing those without love finding and nurturing it from the most unlikely of sources. Yet one wonders whether doing so might literalize what is otherwise a tale filled with the unexpected and wonderment.

     Both narratives, however, end in violence and death. Although this film certainly does not represent the deeply ugly and destructive world of Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy of Czech boy prostitution in the early 1990s, it does share some of the brutal abuse of natural believers such as Franz Bieberkop in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends. But here it is the female prostitutes who are subjected to far more horrific treatment by their female pimp who nightly motorcycles by with her thug to collect her share of the woman’s receipts and to beat any of the girls who are not living up to expectation or to scare away the “crazies” such as Cười who is fascinated with Hanh. Basically, the male prostitutes of Ho Chi Minh City are left by themselves, working on their own hours, as we observe through Lam, and making a fairly good living. It’s what these men do to one another in their off hours that is so terrifying.

      Khôi, who we later discover has been kicked out of his home upon his parents discovering that he is gay, arrives in the former Saigon to see if he make a living. But no sooner has he purchased a newspaper to check out room rents than he is spotted by the handsome and physically fit Đông, who spots his pigeon immediately surmising his sexuality and situation, inviting him to share his apartment for far less that most other rentals. When Đông takes Khôi to see the place, however, the new renter encounters another person, Lam, whom Đông describes as his younger brother, living there, who is not at all happy, so it appears, with the possibility of another roommate.

      Actually, we quickly discover, Lam is Đông’s lover, and the two quickly confer, ending with Đông’s suggestion that Khôi take a much-needed shower. When he does so, they not only steal all of the contents of his suitcase including his papers and money, but Đông sends Lam into steal even the clothes the naif has been wearing, which leaves the new boy literally naked without anything that might permit him a dinner or even a job to pay for it, if he were to find enough clothing to even appear in public.     

     If Lam wonders if they might, at least allow him his official papers, Đông suggests it’s better they take them too, since it will force the boy to return to the provinces, without realizing that is almost impossibility for Khôi. In fleeing, the two leave as well unpaid rent, and when Khôi finally discovers some basic clothing, gathering up the stereo and other electronic material to sell for his

survival, the apartment owner spots him and threatens to send him to jail, not at all sympathetic for the poor boy’s situation.

     But even the significant new cash they’ve absconded with doesn’t seem to be enough, as he sends his friend off to get him a sandwich, having disappeared by the time he returns, leaving his lover in the lurch as he escapes the city. Lam almost seems relieved, however, to be free of the manipulative Đông, who we later discover through his conversations with a fellow male hustler, introduced him without Lam even knowing it was his lover’s profession, to prostitution by forcing him to have sex in a threesome with another “friend,” actually a customer. By the time we hear the full story, we recognize Đông as the true villain of the work, despite Lam’s continued and quite explicable—even to himself—love for him.

      In the meantime, Khôi finds menial work as a porter and Lam returns to the only profession he has learned, prostitution. And for long parts of this film, Vũ’s camera simply observes the two at their jobs as he introduces the subplot of Hạnh and Cười. Lam eventually begins to tell his story to a fellow hustler Long (La Quoc Hung), who eventually falling in love with Lam, asks if the two of them might have sex, Lam, having learned his lessons from Đông, refusing to mix business with pleasure.

      And Khôi, attempting to uproot vines covering the roof of the building in which he works, falls, badly hurting himself only to discover he is again moneyless and unemployed. Part one of this film ends, however, positively, with the birth of Cười’s duckling and the discovery by Lam of Khôi sleeping in an open stall, returning his suitcase full of clothes and a billfold to which he has added his own hard-earned money.

 

      Although there are obvious foretellings of what is to come—Hahn’s pimp, finding Cười once more sitting near the prostitute almost killing his beloved duck and Đông returning to demand that Lam join him once again, the first section ends quite lovely, with Lam taking in Khôi and the two beginning a loving relationship as they ritually wash each other’s hair and trim their toenails.

       The wheel inevitably turns once more in the second part, wherein Khôi is increasingly disturbed by his lover’s work as a prostitute, and his own attempts to work as a bookseller.  Đông, now in retaliation for Lam’s dismissal of him, dies everything he can to destroy their relationship. Frustrated by his actions, Lam stabs Đông in the foot. But because of his prostitution, Khôi ultimately leaves him ultimately in any event. Now desperate Lam begins to rob his sexual clients, one of his victims sending his gang out to beat him to death.

     When Hahn’s pimp once more comes across Cười and her girl together, the two finally having become friends, she again takes up the duck threatening to eat it, in reaction to which Hanh clubs both her and her thug to death.

       So things do not end well for the figures of this film, one of the gay men—in his role as both victim and victimizer perhaps the most interesting character of work—as in so many Hollywood films meeting up with death. Yet this is apparently the first film out of Viet Nam that does not treat gay men as effeminate stereotypes, and involves all of its “outsider” figures in a world much complex and full of contradictions than previously witnessed in Vietnamese cinema. If the characters seem, at moments, to be fairly unoriginal to audiences of Western films, I can only argue that the acting of both Linh Sơn and, in particular Lương Mạnh Hải is sophisticated enough to keep our attention through the narrative rough spots. And we are certainly saddened when Lam and Khôi are unable to make a go of their relationship, given all they have both suffered for love.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).