April 2007

Talking about movies: Journeys Back

By Frank Beaver

Journeys back, especially to places that were part of one's distant past, have often been the subject and structural form of movies. A classic example is Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (1957), a film about an elderly and renowned medical professor who is traveling by automobile with his daughter-in-law back to the university city of his youth to receive an honorary degree for his contributions to humankind. The trip provokes unsettling conversations, memories and dreams for the old professor.

I thought of "Wild Strawberries" as I prepared to return to Vietnam this past February. It was my first trip back since I was sent there as a soldier in 1962—at the very beginning of what the Vietnamese now call "the American War." I had vivid memories of my year-long tour of duty in Saigon; it was a time of both exciting historical events and of a quiet personal loneliness for me. The thought of going back made me wonder how I would feel and what I would find. Would I feel Proustian moments of new awareness when the remembrance of things past suddenly confronted things present? I had no small amount of trepidation and uncertainty.

When the Vietnam Airlines plane I was traveling on touched down at Tan Son Nhat Airport, I looked out the cabin window toward a corner lot just at the edge of the runways. I recognized the site of the little cantonment area where I and my fellow Army Security Agency soldiers had lived.

The old water tower I had known still stood in the distance, as did the now-rusted tin helicopter hangar that had housed the first Huey ("banana") helicopters that the US had brought to Saigon. That hangar had been no more than 100 yards away from the little wooden huts that we'd lived in. But the huts were gone, and in their place were rows of abandoned concrete helicopter sheds—a haunting sign of the war escalation that occurred after I left Saigon.

Beyond the hangars, where our service club, mailroom, tennis court, and softball field had been, I could make out only a grove of mature trees that had sprung up since my time there. It was there that my Army buddy Wayne Glover had died, killed by a time-bomb that Viet Cong insurgents had stashed beneath the bleachers at our softball field. Wayne and I had been in the same barracks at Ft. Jackson and had flown together on the same plane to Vietnam. When it was time for us to come home, he opted for a tour-of-duty extension.

Arthur Wayne Glover's name is etched in Panel Number One of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. As I gazed toward the grove of green trees, I took them to be (willed them to be) a kind of living, in-Vietnam memorial to Wayne. It was a brightening thought. But then my mind leaped ahead 45 years and I wondered whether that distant act of violence beneath those trees really had any meaning for the world I am living in today. How easy to forget the awful lessons of the past.

Saigon (now officially Ho Chi Minh City but still called Saigon by nearly everyone) was a fairly quiet city influenced by French culture. Much has changed. Now eight-and-a-half-million people squeeze into the city. Luxurious hotels have sprung up to greet the ever-increasing influx of international tourists. English has replaced French as the second language. Leaving the hotel next to the American consulate, I headed straightaway to the city's main street, a fairly short thoroughfare that runs from the French-built Notre Dame Cathedral down several fashionable blocks to the Saigon River.

The street's name is now Dong Khoi ("General Uprising"). In my time it was To Do ("Freedom Street"). During the French colonial period it was the rue Catinat.

On this historic street sits the Continental Palace Hotel where the French socialized and dined (as I had in 1962) on the hotel's open-air, wrap-around veranda. The Continental was also where Graham Greene lived in the 1950's while writing "The Quiet American," a prophetic 1955 novel about Vietnam that concerned war, politics, and a love triangle involving a British war correspondent, an American political idealist, and a beautiful young Vietnamese woman. Two movies have been made of this great book that warned that neither the French nor the Americans could triumph over Ho Chi Minh's guerrilla forces.

As I approached the Continental, I could hardly recognize it. Much of the sweeping veranda had been filled in with chic boutiques and cafes. I felt very disappointed and wondered if the importance of this fabled old building was being lost? But then later as I made my way back up the street, I was approached by a Vietnamese child who was selling picture postcards. She was as charming as Woody, the urchin in "Three Seasons," a film about modern day Saigon which I discussed in a recent column. I told the young girl that I had already bought my postcards. Unfazed, she said: "I have Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American,'" and pulled from her little bag of wares a cellophane-wrapped copy of the novel. It was a delightful, reassuring moment.

There were other wonderful moments and special images. When I was a soldier in Vietnam, I was intrigued by the river ferries pulling into a port terminal on the Saigon River, very near the end of To Do/Dong Khoi Street. They would release a small world of automobiles, bikers, and passengers on foot. I was excited when I saw the film version of Marguerite Duras' novel "The Lover" in 1992. The story is set in Saigon, and the unforgettable opening scene occurs on one of the river ferries that is about to dock at the boat terminal. A French teenage girl, traveling from her home in the Mekong Delta to a boarding school in Saigon, meets an elegant, wealthy Chinese man just before departing the ferry, and the encounter leads to an impassioned coming-of-age sexual alliance. Not only had the artistry and the content of "The Lover" impressed me, but it was the first film I'd seen about Vietnam since leaving that had actually resembled the Saigon that I remembered so vividly. Especially that ferry scene.

Returning, I was pleased to discover that the ferries of Marguerite Duras' memory and my own still arrive almost by the minute, each full of rushing passengers heading for who-knows-what kind of destinies. It was for me a lasting, symbolic image of both the allure and unknowability of Saigon.

I found my journey back exhilarating. Vietnam is now a country of young people; more than 50% of the population was born after 1975, the year the war ended. All the young people I spoke with seemed hopeful and invigorated. The country is unified, and being able to experience that first-hand was especially meaningful for me.

By trip's end in "Wild Strawberries," the old professor's dark emotions have given way to relief and even joy, changes brought about in part by an encounter with some free-spirited, unencumbered youth encountered along the way. This old professor's return to Vietnam ended the same way. At the end of my own journey back, I felt happy, even liberated. 

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.