Having grown up in Quebec, I see that the cultural soul that transpires in every gesture and thought of my parents and grandparents, I do not have it in me. Driven by a desire to decolonize myself during my twenties, I undertook an initiatory journey to Vietnam to live there for a year. With the novel Ru in hand, like a map, I was guided by author Kim Thúy through the smells and sounds of Vietnam.
You can imagine that I couldn’t wait to see the film. Ru. I cried, I laughed and my heart was softened at times. The film captured images of what my parents told me throughout my youth about their immigration journey. I won’t hide that several poorly written scenes made me cringe, but working as a film instructor, I am sensitive to the difficulty of creating films, so I kept an forgiving spirit in the face of the miracle that is produce some cultural work. What I am expressing to you here is therefore not a film review, but rather the thoughts that crossed my mind and which would have escaped a non-Vietnamese audience.
What jumps out at the ears from the first words is the fake accent of the actors. Since Vietnamese is a monosyllabic and tonal language, the French spoken by the Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s has a specific sound that could be described as jerky and singing. Incidentally, for those curious about phonetics, journalist Nicolas Pham publishes comic sketches on his Instagram page perfectly imitating this accent.
However, from the first scenes of Ru, the actors speak with a pseudo-European accent. I suppose that the desire to have trained the actors to adopt an artificial accent would come from two intentions: practically speaking, the producers would probably have wanted the dialogues to be easily intelligible for a French-speaking audience, but also I believe that the Vietnamese diaspora had the desire to sanitize his voice on screen. My hypothesis would be that the Vietnamese here perceive the phonetics of European French as being superior to the tonal accent of the Vietnamese French speakers of the time.
The film evacuated typically Vietnamese cultural aspects which would have been impossible to omit if the film had been directed by a Vietnamese man or woman. In Vietnam, we do not kiss each other with lips on the cheek to express affection, as we know in our Western cultures, but rather we sniff the scent near the cheek of the loved one. Affection through smell is a gesture which was still strongly present in the 1970s, but which is taken up less and less nowadays because of our exposure to foreign customs.
For the Vietnamese, smell, memory and love are closely linked. And since the novel Ru revolves around these themes, it seems to me that omitting the scent kiss in the film is a missed opportunity. It is possible that this gesture seemed too untranslatable for a Quebec audience, and therefore omitted. Or, the actors themselves evacuated this gesture from their cultural vocabulary and did not notice that it was missing during filming.
Another cultural point which is surprising is the absence of mutual aid between the Vietnamese. Watching the film, it seemed as if the Vietnamese protagonist family was isolated and helped only by their Quebec godfathers. Although we can sense that the screenwriters were careful not to present Quebecers as heroes by keeping them in the background, the savior story is palpable. It is true that Quebec sponsors were welcoming, present and generous in the 1970s, but it was the Vietnamese community that supported itself through the challenges of immigration. So why did you evacuate community solidarity from the film?
Ultimately, I think it is the Vietnamese diaspora itself that has an aversion to the possibility of being perceived as practicing communitarianism. In a context where, in public discourse, supportive communities, such as the Hasidic Jews of Outremont, are often perceived as people who “refuse to integrate”, I would say that maintaining a savior narrative allows us to maintain share capital. Can an allophone culture therefore exist outside the understanding of Quebecers without being negatively perceived? To survive here, is the price to pay to fade away?
After all, many young people like me have a first name compatible with the French-speaking world. We learned not to call our children names like Phúc Đạt (“won happiness”) or Bích (“jade”). We speak with a Quebec accent. We don’t talk about religion or politics. Our Vietnamese restaurants have nothing on the menu that a Quebecer would not like. So, no chicken heart, beef tongue, guts, cats, dogs, etc. The reflection is this: are the other cultures with which Quebecers interact never more than incomplete translations, filtered by the vision of a good integrated immigrant?
Fortunately, the film Ru don’t translate everything. One aspect that would seem false to a Quebec audience, but which is actually quite authentic, is the representation of elderly Vietnamese people. In the film, they approach the young protagonist with proverbs that seem far-fetched. In my experience, I have often been approached by adults with life lessons and unsolicited proverbs. Intergenerational wisdom is a subtlety that I am pleasantly surprised to see in this film and which moved me! I never realized the importance of this cultural aspect until today. I am grateful to finally see a reflection of my culture in Quebec cinema.