Minh Nguyen-Vo grew up in a small town during the Vietnam War, far north of the setting of his first feature film, BUFFALO BOY. To ease the tension created by the war raging throughout his country, he escaped to a special oasis, his family’s movie theater. While battles raged outside between Americans and Communists, Nguyen-Vo was able to enjoy other times and other places in Japanese Samurai movies, American Westerns, and Bollywood musical dramas. Even without subtitles or dubbing, the films made a lasting impression on the youth. The images of RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) seared into his mind, even though he didn’t learn its title until many years later.
A collection of short stories, Scent of the Ca Mau Forest, by Vietnamese writer Nam Soon also left an impression on Nguyen-Vo in high school – two in particular which were set in the wet southern regions of Vietnam, an area just as foreign to the young man as the settings of the films he saw.
But movies and literature were put aside as he moved to France to pursue studies in physics. Eventually he made his way to America to finish a Ph.D. in Applied Physics at UCLA. Still intrigued by images and vision, he focused his research on optics and also taught physics. However, something kept nagging at Nguyen-Vo, and he finally put his profession aside and began writing a screenplay based on lives in Ca-Mau province, “where the low land meets the sea, where people survive following the rhythm of the dry [November – April] and flooding seasons [May-October].” With Nam Soon’s short stories once more freshly in his mind, the screenplay of BUFFALO BOY entered the world in 1999.
After winning numerous screenwriting awards, the hopeful filmmaker secured production funds from Canada, Germany, Australia, and the US. With almost a million dollars, Nguyen-Vo finally felt that he could return to his home country to create his film.
Fortunately for the production there were Vietnamese film technicians already familiar with the filmmaking process. Some had worked on propaganda films during the war while younger ones had known only the postwar period in which they sometimes served as crew on narrative features. The director says, “We were able to find people that already had production expertise in set design, costumes, and other areas. We used mostly local crew people, bringing in only three from outside the country."
But filming was not easy in southern Vietnam, especially with all the water. Eschewing any computer-generated imagery, Nguyen-Vo insisted that they film during the rainy and dry seasons. “We worked in the water, through lots of storms, big waves, and strong winds. We had 300 buffalo and two children on the set. It was kind of challenging sometimes. Lots of equipment malfunctions. We had to deal with questions of security, too, running a high-voltage cable over 100 meters of water to the set." That insistence on realism makes the film equally beautiful and bone-chilling.
The stark contrasts between the rainy periods and the dry ones lend themselves to a yin-yang concept of life. Dry/wet, life/death, earth/water, rice/fish, growth/decay. Such an environment of contrasts proved to be fertile ground for Buddhism, which helped the rice farmers/fishermen survive these dramatic shifts. Survival almost seems impossible until the rain stops and the waters recede and the green rice plants make their appearance (after the back-breaking work of plowing and planting).
For the plowing the water buffalo is indispensable. Thus, the title of the film. The relationship between Kim and his family’s two buffalo is extremely tender. The director said in an interview, “The water buffalo is considered a bodhisattva, which in Buddhism is intermediate between God and man because the water buffalo has been an ally of people in harsh environments.” In the Buddhist tradition a bodhisattva is an enlightened being who, instead of spinning on outward/inward into nirvana, remains embodied on earth to help other beings eventually transcend the coils of this world.
But Kim’s relationship with others is more problematic. He is curious about the world beyond his parents’ stilted hut and takes the opportunity to travel with the buffalo to an area far up the peninsula where the buffalo will have sufficient grass to thrive until the rains end in the south. To do so, Kim will need to join a group of other herdsmen, most of whom are older than he and more accustomed to fights among themselves and temporary relations with women. The director has suggested that under French colonization, the period depicted in BUFFALO BOY, Vietnamese men felt powerless and suppressed, so they could show violence only against one another and toward women. Kim inevitably learns both good and bad habits from this fast immersion in male culture.
Nguyen-Vo carefully created three distinctive women characters. Kim’s mother is argumentative and tries to persuade her husband to move away from the water world into a town. Ba Hai is an old woman who is resigned to living in this difficult region and cares for her husband and Kim, who reminds her of their deceased son. Ban, the young woman with a child, sets out to discover her own destiny away from the traps of rain and buffalo herdsmen. Although Kim necessarily comes of age quite rapidly with several life-changing journeys northward and back southward, his destiny finally settles on living much as did his parents and old Ba Hai and her husband. He has seen a bigger world but chooses to retreat to the known rhythms of rainy and dry seasons. For him water returns to its universal meaning of purification.
-- Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
Sources:
• KJ Doughton, “An Interview with Minh Nguyen-Vo,” Kamera.Co.UK
• IMDB.com
• BUFFALO BOY DVD extras
