The Town Within Reach (1983) - Dang Nhat Minh

An elegiac evocation on the psychological and physical trauma inflicted on the personal and social by industrialized human conflict, Nhat Minh Dang's The Town Within Reach is a deeply haunting experience, one which reminded me of Alain Resnais in the way it excavates the psychological toll of conflict through ontological investigation. The Town Within Reach transcends the political in a sense, being imbued with an opaqueness in its film grammar that feels deeply personal yet expansive in how it operates, exhibiting the collective diaspora and dissonance inflicted on social relationships by conflict. Affect is not something that conforms to the restrictive constructions of nationalism or social hierarchy, yet our material conditions are deeply malleable to such forces, and what The Town Within Reach achieves feels like something deeply existential, suggesting that violence itself is spawned through cowardice and self-interest instead of through altruism and empathy towards the other. Frankly, this is a film that I don't feel completely adequate writing about - it's a deeply immersive experience in which feeling is deployed as a means of reaching a sense of transcendence that goes beyond ideology. It recognizes that the social, personal, and political are not disparate but intrinsically linked - the dispersion of conflict itself being far from uniform due to our proclivity towards self-interest that is often forged through nationalism and/or political ideology. In this sense, The Town Within Reach feels like an ode to agrarian ways of living, fond of the simplicity of a reciprocal relationship with nature that doesn't attempt to supplant the natural world but live symbiotically within its grand, anarchic designs. Explicitly the film is interested in purveying the trauma of human conflict and the effects it places on the social though what Nhat Minh Dang has created feels revelatory in its affectional lens towards removing the political apparatus from its discussion of existential questions related to living.