“If I were a real girl, I’d never be hungry. – If you were a real girl, you’d be pregnant!”: 17-year-old Huyen’s reply to her transsexual prostitute flatmate sums up the heroine’s dilemma. The student lives far from her mother in the Vietnamese capital and is seeing a penniless young worker, Tung, whose taste for illegal betting eats up all his money. Huyen’s relatively free life comes to an end when she has to deal with her pregnancy, which is as unwelcome to her boyfriend as it is to herself. But these Juno-like signs take an unexpected turn when the young woman discovers her body and sexuality differently during the weeks before her chosen date of abortion. A character that initially seems simple in her vulnerability becomes more mysterious as the directors’ palette takes on darker tones and the story sidesteps into a sequence with strangely violent notes. From social realism to a more sensual and sensory portrait (the city in the rain), Nguyen Hoang Diep has made a successful debut in filmmaking, after coproducing Dang Di Phan’s Bi, don’t be afraid ! (F3C 2010, out of competition).
C. G.
