Boat People: Persistence of Vision

Akutagawa learns a great deal about that story through the fast friendship he forms with Cam Nuong (Season Ma), a plucky fourteen-year-old who spends her days scavenging for food for her two younger brothers and their sickly mother (Hao Jia-ling). The journalist’s fate also becomes entwined with that of To Minh (Andy Lau), a prisoner in a labor camp who, like more than a few of his countrymen, is desperately eyeing the exits. With quickening momentum and mounting fury, Boat People lays bare the conditions—poverty, enslavement, the everyday threat of violence and execution—that spurred hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee after the fall of Saigon. Between 1975 and 1995, they set out in rickety, overcrowded boats bound for destinations like Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong. Many perished at sea; those who survived found their lives changed forever, haunted by memories of what they’d left behind and overwhelmed by what awaited them in their not-always-welcoming new homes.

All these elements surface in Boat People. More classical in form than her jagged earlier thrillers, but also boldly dialectical in its balance of documentary-informed realism and forceful, sweeping melodrama, the film vaulted Hui to a new level of commercial and critical attention even as it spurred controversy in all directions. Released in Hong Kong theaters in October 1982, it became a domestic hit and won five prizes at that year’s Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. It launched or boosted the careers of any number of Hui’s collaborators, from actors such as Andy Lau and Season Ma to her assistant director, Stanley Kwan (with whom she had first worked on The Story of Woo Viet, and who would go on to become an important feature filmmaker in his own right). From the beginning, too, it carried an unexpectedly resonant subtext: for many who saw it, Boat People’s critique of government oppression seemed to have a great deal to say—none of it good—about not only a reunified Vietnam but also a Hong Kong just fifteen years away from being returned to China by the United Kingdom. Decades later and twenty-five years after the handover, the ongoing Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong’s prodemocracy protests is one reason the film feels so ripe for rediscovery.

Hui has long rejected easy political readings of Boat People, describing it as a human story first and foremost. In a 1983 Film Comment interview with Harlan Kennedy, she said, “Boat People is a survival story set in a tragic moment in history. It’s not a propaganda statement against Communism.” She also noted that, while she had had to submit the script for approval by the Chinese government, no such anti-Vietnam sentiments were ever dictated or imposed. In any event, she paid a steep price to shoot the film with Chinese cooperation; the film was banned in Taiwan, at the time a hugely significant market for Hong Kong cinema, and eventually in Hong Kong as well, despite its initial commercial success there. Ironically, after having hosted and supported the production, China also eventually banned Boat People, claiming the finished film didn’t go far enough in criticizing the Vietnamese regime. These exhibition woes, many prompted by reductive ideological readings and misreadings, can’t help but seem like a grim joke in retrospect: for a while this Vietnam-set, China-shot, Hong Kong–financed, refugee-focused drama was itself a film without a country. There’s something doubly fitting about that state of affairs given Hui’s own splintered sense of national identity, not only as someone born in Manchuria and raised in Hong Kong but also as the daughter of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. (Her bicultural heritage casts an especially fascinating light on her decision to tell the story of Boat People from a Japanese photojournalist’s perspective.)

In any event, the mere fact that the film spurred so much disagreement along political and national lines should have been a clue that it may have been advancing a more nuanced argument than those early dismissals suggested. Decades later, with the various blockades lifted, Boat People looms ever more impressively as one of Hui’s strongest films. It also seems an indelibly, unmistakably political work, less for its advancement of any specific movement or ideology than for its rejection of totalitarianism and its ardent defense of human rights. Above all, it’s a film that regards the political and the human as inextricable—and urges us to do the same.

In the early drafts of Chiu Kang-chien’s screenplay, Boat People was more of a boat-people story. The film originally focused on the prisoner To Minh and his harrowing escape, but when the logistics of shooting at sea proved too daunting, Hui hit upon the idea of shifting the focus to a new character, a visiting journalist, who would bring a unique perspective on the events of the story. The outsider protagonist who serves as the audience’s point of entry into a little-known culture can be a moribund cliché, but Hui sidesteps that trap by binding Akutagawa so closely to the audience as to achieve a kind of complicit spectatorship, a shared persistence of vision that becomes the movie’s entire point. With great formal and conceptual rigor, she unites Akutagawa’s camera with the unseen cameras being used to tell his story (wielded by cinematographer Wong Chung-gei). In a sense, Akutagawa becomes a camera; he becomes our eyes and ears.

This self-reflexive conceit is brilliantly established in a 1975-set prologue, which follows a triumphant Viet Cong military parade through the streets of Da Nang. Akutagawa’s tiny, white-shirted figure weaves nimbly in and out of the uniformed procession, taking pictures from an ever-shifting vantage that merges with our own. But as the camera tracks and pans and Law Wing-fai’s music soars, something captures Akutagawa’s attention: an injured boy, hobbling down an alley on crutches, whom he follows and photographs from behind. The reframing is quick but revelatory: in just a few seconds, we’ve been made privy to a more intimate, quietly truthful angle on the celebration Akutagawa is there to document. From there, the film jumps ahead three years to the photographer’s 1978 school visit, drawing a link between two tragedies—one quiet and mostly hidden, the other publicized with forced smiles and slogans—in which children pay the highest price.

Was it Boat People’s unrelenting focus on the suffering of children that led some critics to recoil, deriding what they perceived as its shameless emotional manipulations? Hui certainly spares us nothing: not the grisly spectacle of Cam Nuong and her siblings visiting a godforsaken chicken farm and picking over freshly executed human corpses for valuables, and not the sight of her brother Nhac (Wu Shu-jun) foraging for scrap metal and accidentally picking up a live explosive. But what makes these moments so piercing is the queasily matter-of-fact detachment of their framing, as if Hui were approximating the view through Akutagawa’s lens. The effect is to deepen and defamiliarize the melodrama, to bring a corrosive realism to even the story’s more nakedly sentimental turns. Movie characters become photography subjects, sometimes framed in distanced group shots and sometimes in direct close-up, none more unforgettably than Cam Nuong, whose haunted gaze—peering up at a photograph memorializing her father, one of countless casualties of the Vietnam War—evokes a great and terrible absence.

“What makes the film so hard to pin down is precisely this modulation of horror and uplift, the daily navigation of dread and hope in a society still capable of presenting a false front to the world.”

For all this, Boat People isn’t all despair. There’s a delightful, almost Spielbergian levity to the scenes with Cam Nuong’s younger brothers: Nhac, with his street-smart hustle and dangling cigarettes, and little Lang (Guo Jun-yi), with his insatiable appetite for noodles. And Lam and Ma have a marvelous on-screen rapport as Akutagawa and Cam Nuong, whether he’s photographing her in the rain, in the movie’s most blissfully carefree interlude, or helping her chase a thief before giving up with a laugh and a shrug. What makes the film so hard to pin down is precisely this modulation of horror and uplift, the daily navigation of dread and hope in a society still capable of presenting a false front to the world. Until his fate is sealed in the astoundingly grim finale, Akutagawa seldom appears to be in any real danger from a government whose representatives keep trying to cajole him into submission.

The men and women Akutagawa spends his time with are not so fortunate. Cam Nuong’s mother, racked with illness, grief, and shame at having had to work as a prostitute, is doomed from the moment this journalist invades her home. (The film is hardly blind to the ways in which Akutagawa’s presence can make a bad situation demonstrably worse.) To is doomed, too—if not by the buried land mines he spends his days defusing then by his attempts to secure safe passage for himself and a friend on a refugee boat, paving the way for the movie’s most horrific sequence. (Incidentally, Hui had originally wanted To to be played by her Story of Woo Viet star, Chow Yun-fat, but he turned down the role, fearing that participating in a Chinese shoot would get him blacklisted in Taiwan. The beneficiary was Lau, another Hong Kong star in the making whose youthful charisma burns through the screen even in this truncated role.)