Cinema
Loan mắt nhung
Lê Dân · 1970
Synopsis
Loan is an ordinary boy from Saigon whom circumstances gradually push to the wrong side: poverty, bad company, a first misdeed, and there he is, settled in the city's underworld, where his reputation grows. The film follows this descent and what it costs those around him, in a wartime Saigon where young people lose their way for lack of anything else to do.
Context
The director had proposed to the company Cosunam Films, which imported films and wanted to produce its own, an adaptation of Nguyễn Thụy Long's novel about the Saigon underworld; he wrote the screenplay himself. It was the first of a series of three films about youth, which he conceived, he wrote, to criticise the decay of society under the American occupation. Thanh Nga, a star of sung theatre, plays the female role, and Huỳnh Thanh Trà, a stage actor chosen for his large eyes, was launched by this film.
Who it is for
In Vietnamese, with no known subtitles. Popular cinema of Saigon before 1975, worth seeing for what it shows of a city and an era that the cinema of the North never filmed.
Prizes and reception
The film that launched its lead performer and one of the best-known titles of Saigon cinema before 1975.