Ma Dai

(Movie Review)

Why I Watched This Movie
I was having coffee with a Vietnamese friend, and she asked me if I had ever seen any Vietnamese movies.  Mentally, I tried to run through all the foreign films I had seen in my life.  It's not a big list to begin with, and I could think of no Vietnamese movies.
"Do you want to go?" she said.  "There's a funny comedy about a ghost playing at the cinema now."
"I can't understand Vietnamese," I answered.
"It's alright,"she said.  "All the cinemas in Vietnam play Vietnamese movies with English subtitles."
This in itself was surprising to me.  It certainly has not been the case of other foreign countries I've lived in.  Japan, for example, make no such concessions for English speaking foreigners inside their cinemas.  (I'm given to understand the same is true in Cambodia, but I never bothered with Cambodian cinema when I was there.) But apparently this was standard practice in Vietnam.
"Alright then," I answered.  "Let's check it out."

The Premise
Since I doubt this movie is well known outside of Vietnam, I'll recap the premise here.    It's a classic "geek gets the beautiful girl" romantic comedy, with a ghost twist.  Tho is an ugly, poor, socially inept loser.  Lam is a rich, beautiful, ambitious business woman.  Tho is hit by a bus while he is leering at Lam, and dies.  For some reason, he is allowed to return to earth, but can only communicate with Lam, because she was the last person who saw him before he died (even though she has no clue who he is.)  Tho has various loose ends on earth he needs to tie up, and needs Lam's help to do it.  Lam is reluctant to help a nerdy ghost of someone she doesn't even know.  So he haunts her until she agrees to his various ridiculous requests.  Hilarity ensues.
Trailer below for anyone who wants to get the feel for this movie.



The Negatives
*   I know Tho is supposed to be cast as the "lovable" loser in this kind of movie, but I just found him to be more of a leering, lecherous pervert than anything.  Also, even as a ghost, he has an incredible sense of entitlement.  (He expects Lam to just drop everything to help him, and when she doesn't, he feels completely justified in screwing up everything in her life.)
Unfortunately if you can't really cheer on the main protagonist, then the whole movie kind of derails from there.

* Similarly, Lam is equally unappealing as a protagonist.  Granted the actress who plays her is drop dead gorgeous, so sex appeal is not a problem, but her whole character is just written as someone incredibly spoiled and selfish.  And although she does learn a few life lessons as the movie goes on, her defining character traits never seem to get beyond the point of "beautiful" and "stylish", and the movie thinks that these character traits alone justify Tho's obsession with her.

* Almost nothing the characters did made any sense or seemed consistent with their motivation.  Tho goes from not knowing Lam at all, to feeling somehow justified in haunting her for very little reason.  Lam adopts a needlessly belligerent attitude against Tho.
I get that all of this is just set up for the necessary jokes in a movie like this, but the problem with this kind of movie is that you can never forget that everything is just a set-up for necessary jokes.

* Throughout my time in different countries, I've learned that a lot of humor is cultural.  And this extends not only to the word play and political/ religious jokes, but a lot of the slap stick and silly exaggerated facial expressions is just played for different comic effect in different countries.  Of course we have slapstick and silly faces in American comedies as well, but it's done a bit differently, and viewing slapstick comedy from another culture always strikes me as weird and cartoonish.  That's just my bias as an American viewer, but since these movie reviews are about my own subjective experiences watching these movies, it gets put in the negative problem

* This movie would not end.  Every time one problem got resolved, and I thought Tho was done harassing Lam, something else would pop up.

The Review
So, this is totally unfair for me as an American to review a film from a cinematic culture I have no experience of.  Nor do I have the ability to compare it against it's own genre in the culture it originated from.
But....that caveat aside, I'm just going to say that from my subjective experience, in my own subjective enjoyment, inside my own little subjective head...I'm going to give this film only one star.

Ratings :
One out of 10 stars.  (I did actually enjoy the experience of being in an air conditioned theater for the afternoon, and of getting some exposure to Vietnamese culture.  So it wasn't all bad.  But as for the merits of the movie itself--one star it is.)

Other Thoughts
* All my complaints aside, I still think it was very nice of Vietnam to subtitle their movies in English for me.  I appreciate the gesture to include foreigners.  (Quick Internet survey: does anyone know of any other non-English countries which have English subtitles for their movies?)

* Watching a foreign film can be a jarring experience, because you're less used to all the foreign conventions, and you're less inclined to give them the normal space that you would give to the conventions of your own country's films.  (Hence, all my complaints above).  At the same time, it can also be a fascinating little glimpse into another culture.  And a reminder that there are tons of other film cultures out there that we Americans just forget exist.  (How much time do you regularly spend thinking about say the films in Vietnam?  Or, say, Uzbekistan?)
I imagined I could see glimpses into Vietnam's culture through this movie.
Of course I have to be careful before I pontificate.  I'm not an expert by any means.  I've only lived in Vietnam for one month, and this is the only Vietnamese movie I've seen.
And yet, from this movie I got the impression that the wealth gap was a big deal in Vietnam.  (As it probably is in any developing country).  The huge chasm between the have-nots, who are struggling to survive (like Tho's family) and the haves (like Lam's family) was a big plot point.
In Cambodia (which I'm somewhat more familiar with), there was always a sense that the lives of the poor don't matter, and that the lives of the rich did, and so there was always a huge obsession to either get rich, or to appear to be rich.
This movie seems to indicate the same in Vietnam.  It plays it for humor, when Lam, the rich girl, is forced to try to dress up like a poor garbage collector.  The humor is that she is dressed in poor clothes, but driving a really nice car, so everyone stares at her.
I wasn't altogether sure that the humor was based on an egalitarian social outlook, however.  Parts of the movie, where the audience's sympathy is supposed to be with the rich girl Lam, seemed to be based more on class snobbery.  I don't know, maybe I was getting the wrong end of the stick, but I thought the audience was supposed to sympathize with and idealize the rich and beautiful Lam, and laugh at the Tho's poverty stricken family.  Which is another reason I disliked this movie.

* Since I'm currently living in Saigon, I recognized several parts of the city in this movie.
People who live in major world cities all their life must be used to having their cities always gracing the cinema screen.  But having grown up in a sleepy mid-western town, it's a new experience for me.  I can't tell you how weird it was to see buildings and streets that are only a few blocks from my own current apartment shown in this movie up on the big cinema screen.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky & Kathleen Cleaver on Race, Gender and Class Issues - Black Panthers (1997) YouTube