Boat People (1982): Ann Hui’s controversial snapshot of post-war Vietnam (Review)

There’s an extra on Criterion UK’s Blu-Ray of Ann Hui’s 1982 film Boat People that’s so good, I’d like to beg your indulgence to deal with it before we get to the main feature. Keep Rolling is a two-hour documentary about Hui’s life and career by Man Lim-Chung. Made in 2020, it’s unusual in that the anecdotes about Hui’s early years are as intriguing and compelling as the ones about her making internationally successful films like Boat People and A Simple Life. When she admits to being – sometimes disastrously! – unconcerned about money, you gain some understanding of how she can flit so casually from commercial films like the Michelle Yeoh vehicle Stunt Woman to passion projects like The Golden Era, a three-hour biopic of the author Xiao Hong. Her family background, too, is diverse enough to provide another explanation for her wide-ranging interests: a Chinese father, a Japanese mother, born in Hong Kong.

Viewing non-Western directors through the lens of their heritage can be patronising, but in Hui’s case, it’s hard not to see this as foundational. Some of her career fits neatly into the Hong Kong mainstream, such as her early supernatural comedy The Spooky Bunch and the Shaw Brothers production Love in a Fallen City. Equally, there are films like A Simple Life which resemble the domestic dramas of Japanese auteurs like Ozu and Kore-eda more than most films made on her side of the East China Sea. And then there’s Boat People, which has an incredibly internationalist outlook on paper: made in Hong Kong, set in Vietnam, its protagonist is a Japanese photojournalist sent to cover life in the aftermath of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War.

I say “on paper” because, despite being a hit on release and consistently acclaimed in the decades afterwards (in a 2005 Hong Kong Film Awards poll of the greatest Chinese-language films ever made, this came 8th), Boat People has occasionally found itself in trouble for its bleak image of Vietnamese life. It has managed the possibly unique double of being denounced as a PR piece for the Chinese government and accused of being anti-Communist propaganda – sometimes by the same people. At its US premiere at the New York Film Festival, several critics accused it of presenting a one-sided, decontextualised portrait of Vietnam; while they could be accused of seeing the film too heavily through the lens of America’s own disastrous incursion into Vietnam, their accusations can’t be dismissed lightly.

There are three ways to defend Boat People. The first is that, for all it isn’t presenting the whole truth, it’s certainly telling part of the truth. Hui and her screenwriter Dai An-Ping based the film’s script on stories Hui heard during the making of her 1979 documentary A Boy From Vietnam; the title Boat People is a nickname given to those Vietnamese citizens who made it out to China and Hong Kong. China and Hong Kong were, at that time, very clearly different countries, and this leads us to the second way Boat People can be read. In a 2015 video essay by Christopher Heron (not included on this disc), it is pointed out that Hong Kong’s citizens knew by 1982 that their country’s status as a British colony might be ending; the formal agreement to transfer power to China came just two years later. Boat People can, therefore, be read as a safety vent for this anxiety, a way of criticising Communist authoritarianism while keeping China happy by transferring that critique over to one of their enemies.

This may have some truth to it, but it does make you feel rather sorry for Vietnam. First you get bombed by a string of imperialist powers, then you’re used as a proxy for them to criticise each other! At the time of writing, Vietnam is a peaceful country with a fast-growing economy. Its elections do still tend to feature an, uh, monochromatic list of permitted parties, but it doesn’t seem impossible that it could repeat France’s trick of transferring from a revolutionary state to a functioning democracy. That comparison kept coming to mind during Boat People, and it made me think of the controversy over Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke. Rohmer responded to the criticism of his negative depiction of the French Revolution by saying the post-Revolutionary period was “called The Terror for a reason”, and Hui might make a similar defence. If you are being beaten, shot at or forced into a public confession by military officers, does it make much difference whether or not the military officers are from your country or an invading country? If a child steps on an abandoned landmine, as happens in one of Boat People‘s most wrenching scenes, does it matter whether that landmine was Communist or capitalist?

Even Boat People‘s most diligent critics will acknowledge that it’s a powerful, well-made film, and I think this leads us to the third, most compelling, reason to defend Hui’s work. I do not think it is excessive to suggest Hui has captured something essential about the horror of war here, something eternal, something that will cause the arguments over the film’s politics to fade away as surely as the arguments over Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness did. That hasn’t happened yet, largely because the question of whether someone is pro- or anti-China is still a live one in global politics. But Hui’s direction, and the performances from George Lam and a young Andy Lau, are all rich and heartfelt enough to make you imagine a time when this will just be a film, rather than a reactionary film or a liberal film or any other label you might add.

The film is more of an emotional drama than the war movies Hui’s countryman John Woo was making in the 1980s, but the violence, when it comes, is harsher and more unapologetic than you may expect. It’s a film that is suitably difficult to feel comfortable with, which on its own makes the charges of propaganda harder to swallow. In any case, Hui includes a neat recurring visual metaphor for her hero’s separation from the country he’s observing, showing us Lam taking a photo, then the scene he’s photographing in irrevocably separated two-shots. The opening scene of him photographing a military parade reminded me of the scene in The Realm of the Senses where a dazed, obsessed Tatsuya Fuji walks blithely past a platoon of soldiers going to war. In Oshima’s film, the hero sees nothing; in Hui’s film he photographs everything. But what does he notice? What does he learn? What does he feel?

Extras are voluminous, and frankly Keep Rolling on its own would justify this as an essential purchase for anyone interested in the history of Hong Kong’s cinema. The disc also includes a regrettably poor quality print of Hui’s 1997 documentary As Time Goes By, which is worth watching if only to get some insight into the director’s thoughts on her native country, and a press conference from Boat People‘s Out of Competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – BOAT PEOPLE (1982)