22/02/2022 - BERLINALE 2022: Vietnamese filmmaker Kim Quy Bui's second feature is an oblique, spiritual and sometimes comic look at death and mourning

Kim Quy Bui’s second feature Memoryland [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which enjoyed its European premiere last week in the Berlinale’s Forum section, is caught between two ways of understanding death, enacting a strange marriage of spirituality and pragmatism. The crux of the film is that death is at once a momentous, transcendent thing, involving a communion with both the spirit and the natural world, and also that the mourning relatives are barred from sharing this, concerned as they are with the bureaucratised funeral system and their own unresolved pain about the departed. Martin Scorsese’s recent film The Irishman contains a sombre scene near the end where the lead character goes shopping for discount deals on his own coffin; Memoryland also captures some of this spirit, showing how preparing for death can’t help but involve a certain banality.

With three overlapping story strands, and a love of symbolism which audiences may not always grasp, Memoryland is a top-heavy film, attempting to convey much but with intermittent clarity. Kim puts us in an uncanny state of suspension in the opening two acts, where the parallels between the stories don’t fully convince, only for them to click once the film reaches its endgame. With its use of diegetic Vietnamese folk songs, the film has an overall musicality, imparting something elusive for us to contemplate, rather than explain more rationally - the difference, to use the film’s terms, between a traditional funeral, and the cold steel doors of the crematorium.

Memoryland’s opening scenes depict two deaths: first the natural passing of Me, an elderly women, in her rural hovel surrounded by discarded and rotting food, and then that of a construction worker called Doan, and the responsibilities that fall to his young widow Moc Mien (Nguyen Thi Thu Trang). Significant for Kim are the different burial rituals accorded to these two people on opposite ends of the age spectrum: after much debate between her children, Me gets the full pomp of a traditional folk funeral, whilst Moc Mien, in addition to all her post-death duties, is subject to societal rejection due to her status as a mourning widow – ‘a single woman is just dirt and trash,’ one older female acquaintance of hers states.

Craving some respite from her ordeal, Moc Mien moves to the city where she meets and eventually houses with Tuong (Vu Mong Giao), a much older man, and the film’s other key character. Tuong is an artist of some renown, and the two are able to provide solace to one another, but without anything romantic passing between them; the unveiling of the older artist’s connection to Me’s family also provides the film with some late-breaking emotional catharsis.

It’s possible to locate the influence of Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Kim, with her interest in erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, as well as the reliance on atmosphere and suggestion over total storytelling transparency. But it’s at once a disappointment, and also inaccurate to its title, that Memoryland never gets to grips with the concept of memory - this strand is just opaque rather than beneficially hazy, speaking of a North Vietnamese way of life clearly ebbing away, but with scant precise detail (beyond Doan’s connection to the re-urbanisation of Hanoi), compared to its characters’ own struggle with mortality.

Memoryland is a co-production of Vietnam and Germany, staged by CineHanoi, Scarlet Visions Gmbh and Scarab Film.