The extended, unbroken shot that opens Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell encompasses everything there is to life itself.
From a fixed vantage point behind a soccer goal, the camera takes in a match in contemporary Saigon. We watch a bystander comically gyrating his hips while standing next to a goofy mascot, its giant head resembling something like a fox. As the mascot walks over to a concessions area, the camera tracks along, eventually settling on a table where three young men hold a serious conversation that is in stark contrast with the silly mascot, to say nothing of the quotidian busyness—a woman selling beer, fans cheering—that is going on behind them. The men are discussing nothing less than eternity, as one of them is about to embark on a spiritual pilgrimage and another snarkily asks why he bothers with such superstition in this day and age.
Somewhere in between these two is Thien (Le Phong Vu). Thien shares his own view on the subject (“The existence of faith is ambiguous”) as the beer vendor interrupts them to promote a new IPA. It suddenly begins to rain, then we hear a screech and a crash from offscreen. The camera slowly pans over to the road, where two mangled motorbikes and three bodies are sprawled across the ground: a man, a woman, and a child. In these opening moments, without a single edit, writer-director Pham Thien An has captured it all: the comedy and tragedy of human existence, along with our struggle to understand it.
For patient viewers, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell will exquisitely expand upon this delicate balancing act over the next few hours: keeping pretension at bay with little bits of humor, asking the biggest of questions with a humble curiosity, and doing it all with an astonishing display of formal control—all the more so considering this is An’s first feature. Few debuts have felt this prodigious.
Shortly after that opening scene, another tragedy interrupts Thien’s life: his sister-in-law suddenly dies. (There is the possibility that she was actually in the aforementioned crash, although I was unclear on that point.) Because his brother left the family years earlier, the care of Thien’s little nephew, Dao (Nguyen Thinh), falls to him. Thien is a natural, gentle caretaker, as he dutifully brings Dao back to the predominantly Christian village where Thien was raised for the funeral and burial.
As Thien, Le Phong Vu gives a performance that patiently, quietly reveals its sophistication. For much of the early part of the film, we don’t see much of Thien’s face, but instead gather clues to his nature from his soft voice—especially the empathetic way he responds to others with an understanding “Hmm.” A flashback section—to Thien’s youth in the village, when he had a romance with a young woman (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh) who went on to become a nun—allows Vu to reveal more layers, especially during an anguished karaoke performance where his face is front and center.
Back in the present time, surrounded by the religiosity of the services for his sister-in-law—to say nothing of Dao’s probing questions about faith and heaven—Thien is forced to confront his own existential anxieties. Or, I should say, the existential confronts him. Like the films of Andrei Tarkovsky or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, An’s filmmaking thrums in that liminal space between the immanent and the transcendent. You get the sense of a divine presence pursuing Thien, insistently pushing against the veil (cocoon shell?) of human understanding. When the wind picks up in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell—which it does frequently, softly blowing grasses or leaves or fabrics—you get the impression of something unseen that nonetheless moves the world. Thien performs little magic tricks for Dao to keep him entertained and there is a breathtaking moment—I’ll only say it involves a vase and water—in which Thien conducts a trick, only to have a miracle “performed” on him.
That probably makes Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell sound more sermonizing than it is. To be clear, the movie is always—right down to its beautifully baptismal final shot—immersed in mystery rather than surety. This is also why the camera (the cinematography is by Dinh Duy Hung) moves the way that it does: gradually, cautiously, taking in all possibilities rather than rushing (or cutting) to the “answer.” Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell will try the patience of some viewers, yet each lengthy scene felt, to me, pregnant with possibility and purpose. You watch the film feeling as if life is precious—that every moment holds the chance for great wonder or great tragedy, even if, on most days, we live somewhere in between.
(2/4/2024)
