Bright Ashes leads the audience into the West River with three women vowing to tie themselves to the men who are still alive but dead in their hearts.
The quiet night scene of Thom Rom village was torn apart by a huge fire. From the other side of the canal, people just stood still and watched the raging flames burn a house. Then the whisper of a girl sounded: “What is your husband doing? I know he never comes here to watch the fire. I will tell you, nothing is left out.”
The wife told her husband about the beauty of the fire that over and over burned the house in which the woman he secretly loved lived. Her voice was even, unable to hide the fatigue and anger of an unloved woman. From the way she passionately describes the beauty of the ferocious flames, viewers seem to know they are about to face a story so unusual.
It is the opening verse of Brilliant Ashes, the latest film by director Bui Thac Chuyen, molded by him from two short stories, Brilliant Ashes and Firewood Muc Troi Go by writer Nguyen Ngoc Tu. The work was highly appreciated by international experts and was awarded the Golden Balloon Prize of the Three Continents Film Festival held in France.
Women who are doomed to be damned for love
In Brilliant Ashes, Hau (Juliet Bao Ngoc Doling) is Duong’s wife (Cong Hoang) but is always invisible in her husband’s eyes. Duong’s heart has never faded the silhouette of Nhan (Phuong Anh Dao), even when Nhan was at peace with Tam (Quang Tuan). Duong and Hau had to get married just because they went too far in the drunkenness after Nhan’s wedding.
Fate deepened the wound of Hau’s heart when she had to witness the warm family life of Nhan and Tam every day, while she was alone because her husband left to work far away. Her jealousy towards Nhan gradually turned from jealousy to guilt – she was clumsy, but Nhan was both beautiful and smart, and had a loving husband. However, fate likes to tease again and again to bring calamities, tying the lives of two women in a vicious circle.
Hau and Nhan are like two people standing on either side of a bridge, one side is suffering and the other is happy. The movie is the journey of them walking towards each other, passing each other, and then, in the end, swapping positions when no one knows. People who think happiness are sinking into suffering, those who think they will be sad forever find hope rekindled. In the fire of crazy and blind love, despite everything to make her husband happy, one person turned into brilliant ashes and then melted into nothingness, while the other was like a smoldering flame, just waiting for the wind to blow. in to explode.
The woman who suffers because of the third love of Brilliant Ashes is Loan (Admiral Artist Hanh Thuy). When she was a teenager, she was raped by a man in the neighborhood and drowned in the canal, almost to death. The man (Thach Kim Long) was punished by the law, Loan survived but also became a lunatic and drunk. She suffers from loneliness to the point of swinging with the only lonely man who no one cares about in Thom Rom is … a monk who has not yet shaken the world (Mai The Hiep).
The day Loan’s killer returned, the village thought she would go crazy and would tear his body to vent his anger. But the woman, torn between a hatred she could no longer remember and the loneliness that gnawed at her heart day by day, could not resist the dream of a happily married couple. That fantasy was built by her on the ashes of her painful past, with the person who once harmed her and nearly died.
If the story of Hau and Nhan paints a picture of marriage in exile, Loan, on the other hand, shows that life is no easier when we… don’t have a husband. The three portraits depict three women who are not identical in terms of lines, composition or subject, but all share the same color palette made up of intense shades of the fire of love that burns the heart.
With the love triangle love story of Hau, Nhan and Duong as the center, the land and people in Brilliant Ashes continue to expand in both the length of time and the depth of space. Director Bui Thac Chuyen and his crew did a great job in restoring small but lively corners in the daily life of people in the West. We have a wedding as noisy as a late-afternoon drink, a procession of brides by motorboat, roofs built close to the river. There, people make a living by selling stalls, making dried bananas, burning coal, fishing…
All surrounded, guided by water. Sometimes it will be the river leading to Hau’s house, Nhan’s house, to Tho Su temple and another twisted love story with a monk, a crazy woman and a man who used to be in prison. At other times, the water turns into a wide sea that attracts the eye where Duong isolates himself from a forced marriage. The prison pond next to the coal furnace or the cramped saltwater lagoon is, after all, a reflection of Tam’s broken, dull heart in pain and desire for destruction.
The struggle when retelling Nguyen Ngoc Tu’s story in cinematic language
Watching Brilliant Ashes, the audience can feel the pain and the stalemate that each character has to carry in their hearts. Sometimes, the movie also entertains them with laughter through honest and sincere lines like nothing said. But laugh then cry when the movie is a fairy tale and then “they live happily together forever”.
Unhappiness looms in front of you like a burning house, while happiness is only vague as a promise of “sunshine” or the image of a simple motorboat lost in the open sea. At the end of the film, what remains in the audience’s heart is an emptiness. The desolate emptiness comes from the sad feelings for the characters on the screen, and also the confusion when not being able to fully grasp the content of the work.
In general, the film directed by Bui Thac Chuyen is clear in terms of message and consistent in the emotional line. It tells the audience a story, which is probably nothing new for lover of literature Nguyen Ngoc Tu: The women in the river region are full of life, passionate in love and loyal to become victims of poverty. of those same virtues, silently enduring and serving the unfaithful man.
However, when embarking on implementing that message into a story, or in other words, trying to translate words into images, the film encountered many barriers. Both literary originals are built closely to the emotional circuit of the character – Brilliant Ashes is completely the narrative of the wife and her husband, and Wood Muc Troi Go is the alternating flow of thoughts between the monk. , the ex-prisoner and the mad woman – it is not easy to separate into lines describing the time, place, and actions of the characters from a cinematic perspective.
In particular, Nguyen Ngoc Tu wrote very few lines. In order for the character on the page of her book to say something, it takes a lot of paragraphs ahead to help shape sentences and ideas. In other words, these lines are a distillation, meaning in foreign language, speaking less and understanding more. There are many segments on the film, the lines in the book are quoted intact from the book to the screen that help highlight the character’s charisma.
The movie “Bright Ashes” has tried to recreate these two features, and initially created a space in which each man is like hiding in a bubble; No matter how hard their woman tries, she can’t get through. The feeling of being lost, lonely from both sides can be seen and felt.
The film also has additions to clarify the intention in some scenes – like Tam’s livelihood story or the interaction between Hau and Nhan. But that’s still not enough to fill in the gaps in the events of the story, or explain why a line is played. Besides, the fact that the script ranks everything at the same level of importance without any breakthrough plots or scenes also makes the film look like a lackluster composition because the main protagonist is unknown.
This leads to when watching, the audience easily perceives the Radiant Ashes as rambling, disjointed, and difficult to grasp. After all, in order to fully understand the film, is the audience’s wise choice to read the original novel that incubated the work?
Photo: CJ