Nostalgia for the Countryside is in some respects an ode to the purity of the agrarian lifestyle, an elegy towards a quickly evaporating way of life that was more intertwined with nature and a communal sense of living. The reverberations of the Vietnam war and the pernicious ways in which urbanization brought by transnational capitalism have disrupted and exploited the social order of Vietnam is a central theme, yet by Nhat Minh Dang expressing this through the coming-of-age adolescent archetype, he effectively eliminates some of the intellectual pitfalls that could transpire and delivers something both emotionally and intellectually precise and powerful. Centered around the coming-of-age motif, the film is first and foremost about emotion and feeling. The intellectual aims are obvious but the primary decree remains in expressing the emotions of its characters in a way that certifies it will avoid feeling didactic or dogmatic. An elegy for a deteriorating way of life, this film is imbued with a pathos that permeates - characters search for meaning or a path forward in a world which at best grants them little agency and at worst openly exploits them for not conforming to modernity. Self-discovery, sexual/intellectual awakening, and burgeoning identity - common themes of the coming-of-age story that wonderfully align with a story of mass-scale societal disruption. With existential longing and deeply-repressed pain, the characters of this wonderfully evocative story wrestle with a festering deep-seated anguish that is largely beyond their control. Nostalgia for the Countryside doesn't romanticize rural life, it has a steadfast acknowledgment of the work it entails. Work was never the issue but who has the authority to define what work? These people are victims of grand-scale upheaval, the societal order reconfiguring to service capital in the post-war milieu in which so many flocked to urban centers to sustain themselves in the quickly changing socio-economic system. Those that remained felt the pressure to conform to the majority, exploited and impoverished. Nostalgia for the Countryside details this extremely well. A searing familial drama steeped in understated and internalized pain, Nhat Minh Dang is in a sense acknowledging that modernity and industrialization have won. He is steadfast in expressing the social and psychological toll of forced diaspora but Nostalgia for the Countryside ultimately feels like nothing more than an emotive elegy to a more communal, more natural way of life, one the director seemingly acknowledges is bound to be exterminated and there is great tragedy in that.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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