A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Sony Pictures Classics
Grade: B+
Directed by: Hans Petter Moland
Written by: Sabina Murray, story by Sabina Murray, Lingar
Jervey
Cast: Bai Ling, Tran Dang Quoc Thinh, Tim Roth, Temuera
Derek Morrison, Nick Nolte
Screened at: Sony, NYC, 6/9/05

In America even today, many parents warn their children
against dating members of other races and religions. "You'll get
involved, you'll get married, and your kids won't be accepted by
either race (or religion)." As to whether this is true or not, we'll
let the sociologists iron things out, but in Norwegian director
Hans Petter Moland's nicely filmed "A Beautiful Country," that
aphorism informs the entire story.

During the American involvement in Southeast Asia from
1964-1975, some 12,000 to 18,000 children were born to
Vietnamese women, fathered by American servicemen. In
some cases the couples were legally married, in most others,
probably not. Chances are that the number of GI's who
regarded their marriage vows as binding on a global basis was
small. Most left their children and their women in place, in
Saigon and other regions of the country.

What actions did these children take vis-a-vis their missing
American daddies? I'd venture a guess that some were curious,
others couldn't care less, while a few not only would have liked
to meet their biological fathers but scraped up the money to sail
to New York, legally or otherwise, maybe even to stay in the
U.S. The trip was arduous: to samplef the rigors of the voyage,
Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" provides an extreme example. In
the Vietnam-to-America situation, some came over as
indentured servants–yes, slavery was alive even in the mid-20th
Century as greedy crews on board ramshackle vessels might
charge a down payment of couple of thousand dollars for each
passenge. The proviso was that once they landed in New York,
they would work off the debt in restaurants, night clubs, or
what-have-you, their very bodies paid for by the owners of those
establishments.

In "A Beautiful Country," Binh (Damien Nguyen in his striking
debut performance), whose mother is Vietnamese and father a
GI is what used to be called in the American West a
"half-breed," with the height of a typical American male and a
Vietnamese face. Though his birth to a man who at the time
was an enemy of the Viet Cong is obviously no fault of his own,
he is not accepted by the Vietnamese with whom he has
contact, nor–as at least one guy on an American vessel bound
for the States says–would he fit in here in the U.S. In Vietnam,
he is called "Bui Doi," or "less than dust." (The irrationality of
rejection through no fault of the victim is repeated in parts of
Africa, like the Darfur region of Sudan, where women who are
raped by enemy soldiers are cast out by their own families.)

Binh meets the mother (Chau Thi KimXuan) whom he had not
seen in years and works with her in the upscale house of a rich,
nasty woman. After an accident, Binh is forced to flee, winds up
in a Malaysian refugee camp where he meets a Chinese
hooker, Ling (Bai Ling). They manage to make their way to a
New York-bound tanker. After working in Chinatown as a virtual
slave, he escapes, is given lifts to Houston, and searches for his
father who, he is told, works on a remote ranch. Their meeting
results in a heartwarming rendezvous with his father, Steve
(Nick Nolte).

Since the filming took place largely in Hanoi and its outskirts,
one wonders how the Communist government there allowed
lenser Stuart Dreyburgh to photograph a rich woman, who is
exploiting her labor as surely as any colonialist would show
arrogance toward the locals. We are not made aware of why
Binh's mother had abandoned him and yet greets him warmly.

The topic of immigration has been amply covered by the
cinema, though in this case, director Moland gives the old
theme a fresh, vibrant look, evoking solid performances from
the entire ensemble.

Not Rated. 125 minutes © 2005 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com