Adrift
(Choi Voi)

Duyen’s marriage to Hai ensures his admission into the male circle, a virility that his peers display as a social convention whereas, under the complicit and vigilant gaze of the women who surround her, the fiancee must become a woman. But here, on the contrary, marriage weakens the characters’ points of reference. Bui Thac Chuyen’s second feature-length fiction’s success is due to the description it offers of a seemingly ordinary situation without surrendering to convenient naturalism. The characters are no longer models on which a social portrait could be stuck, but mobile drawings constantly reworked. Beyond taboo, distress and hesitation, in a sense, the proof of their existence. JB

Participation in the 2003 Nantes Produire au Sud Workshop