“I love you a lot of time,” says a sex worker Vietnamese to US troops, turning his hips while selling his services. “Your party?” The first female character in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War Classic “Full Metal Jacket”, appears for a moment, and half of the film.
Similarly, it is an hour in “Apocalypse Now” by Francis Ford Coppola When a helicopter suddenly deposits three women in a stage. They are playboy bunnies with scarcely dressed, chopped to irritate the troops. They also appear for just a few minutes.
The Vietnam War produced some of the most unforgettable films in the late seventies and eighties, such as the main Hollywood filmmakers such as Kubrick, CoppolaOliver Stone and others dealt with their painful legacy. Few, however, had classic female characters, or even three -dimensional, with the remarkable exception of “Coming Home”, which won Jane Fonda An Oscar.
But while these films were almost exclusively on how war dehumanized men, with female characters mere devices to tell that story, the opposite was often true for Vietnamese movies about the conflict. Many of these were told from a feminine point of view: the stories of brave and loyal women, for example, went to keep the united families.
Here are some ways in which Classic Vietnam War Films They used female characters to tell their stories:
Michael Cimino, winner of multiple Oscar “The Deer Hunter” It focuses on three lifelong friends of a city of steel in Pennsylvania that is going to fight, with traumatic results.
Since the 1978 drama begins and ends at home, there is space for a female character in Linda by Meryl Streep, Nick’s girlfriend (Christopher Walken) that also connects with Michael (Robert De Niro). An early career streep was a presence as magnetic as beautiful, winning an Oscar nomination, which disguised a rather thin role that mainly advanced the narrative of men.
A rare contrast was Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home” the same year, in which Fonda and Jon Voight won the Oscars for the history of a marine wife wrapped in an intense matter with a veteran injured in the rehabilitation center where he offers as a volunteer.
“This is the only Hollywood film established during the Vietnam War that is told from the point of view of a female character,” says filmmaker Tony Bui, who also teaches the Vietnam War cinema at Columbia University. “That is really saying something.”
His tortured trip to the screen is a drama in itself, but “Apocalypse Now” of 1979, with Martin Sheen as captain of the army in charge of murdering an American renegade colonel (Marlon Brando), is considered a masterpiece of the genre. As in many Hollywood Vietnam films, women are extras in the villages, shouting and fleeing fires and mortal explosions, or brutally killed without any reason.
Then there are Playboy rabbits, which turn to “Suzy Q” as the troops fant more and more with erotic emotion and finally assault the stage.
Lan Duong, assistant professor of film studies at the University of Southern California, sees Coppola trying to make a connection between sex, war and masculinity.
“With American white women in particular, they are seen as part of US mythology around virility,” says Duong. The full blood virility with furious hormones, he says, is “as American as apple cake.”
In “squad” of 1986, the winning representation of the Oscar de Stone of the Jungle War, the representation of women comes in a horrible scene in which US troops kill hundreds of innocent villagers, evoking the real life my Lai massacre. During the killing, the idealistic soldier Chris (Charlie Sheen) meets the soldiers who violate young women. “She is a human being!” He shouts. They answer: “You do not belong to ‘Nam, man.”
These women are not given voice. They appear “only in relation to violence inflicted by men,” says Bui.
In the “victims of war” by Brian de Palma (1989), the tragic victim of rape actually becomes a central character in the plot. However, this does not mean that we learn a lot about this Vietnamese girl (Thuy Thu).
Based on a real event, the film follows five soldiers whose leader (Sean Penn) designs a disgusting plan: the group will kidnap a girl by “recreation” during a mission.
Only Pvt. Eriksson (Michael J. Fox) Objects. The other four not only violate the girl, but finally pump her with bullets. Eriksson takes the case to the superiors, who advise him to let him fall. But Eriksson persists, and men earn punishment.
Although it is important, this brutalized girl has no voice. “She goes from suffering more, and then she is murdered, that is her arch,” says Bui, who includes the movie in a Criteria channel collection He has commissioned in Vietnam films.
Kubrick’s memorable “full metal” in 1987 contains two short and stereotyped scenes involving sex workers. But the most interesting scene that involves a female character comes during the battle, where a sniper aimed at US troops turns out to be a terrified girl in pigtails. As long as it lies mortally injured, he begs for a low voice: “Displag.” The soldiers force.
The stereotypical nature of the scenes of sex workers is, for BUI, redeemed by the character of the sniper (Ngoc Le), whose courage is recognized.
In Bui’s “three seasons”, a 1999 Vietnamese-American production, the sex worker LAN (Diep Bui) is essential for history, an exploration of postwar life in the city of Ho Chi Minh. A Cyclo driver falls in love with Lan and heals her to the city, trying to help her find a better life.
Bui says that his research has found that more than half of the Vietnamese films about the conflict have female protagonists. One of the most famous, Hải Ninh, “Hanoi’s girl” (1974), follows a young woman (Lan Hương) looking for her family in Hanoi bombarded.
Another, ặng nhật minh “When the Denth Month Comes” (1984), tells Duyen’s story (Lê Vân), a young wife and mother in the rural north whose husband goes to war. His nicing father -in -law frequently asks him why the soldier has not written home. Duyen finds out one day that her husband has been dead for a year and recruits a local school teacher to help her hide that forging eloquent letters.
The character is emblematic of the way Vietnamese culture has long portrayed the woman: fierce, loyal and resistant to adversity, says Duong.
“She is beautiful. She is suffering. She is loyal to the memory of her dead husband,” says Duong. “It has been argued by ặng nhật minh himself … that she is a symbol for the nation itself. Therefore, it becomes a really rich metaphor for filmmakers.”
The risk, he adds, is that such characters, which serve as symbols, can also lack dimension.
Stone is one of the only directors who has explicitly approached the minimum role of women in their works in Vietnam, saying that “squad” was deliberately a narrative driven by men.
But with his third and last Vietnam War film, “Heaven AND Earth ”(1993), Stone changed to the perspective of a real -life Vietnamese woman: Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le), who supports rape and torture as a young woman, then moves to California with her problematic US military husband (Tommy Lee Jones).
“There is something really in the criticism of my treatment of women.” Stone said While making the movie. “I have a lot to learn above all, not just women.”
Making his glass point, Stone dedicates the movie to his mother, Jacqueline Stone.
