CHUYEN DI CUOI CUNG CUA CHI PHUNG

A green truck drives through the night. In the morning, a marquee-like structure is erected and, in the evening, in the half-light of small lamps, wigs begin to move up and down, the New Year songs fall silent for the sale of tombola tickets. Madame Phung and her troupe of transvestite singers travel around Viet Nam, arousing the fascination and hostility of the local authorities and inhabitants. Attentive to the sometimes clipped rhythm of fairground life and to the way in which this small travelling community copes with the bad weather and villagers who come to annoy them after the shows, Nguyen Thi Tham takes the film beyond a simple chronicle of the picturesque. “Where does theatre begin, where does life finish?”: the question asked by the heroine of Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach could also be that of the troupe’s leader, who transmits much more than instructions in the wings: a modus vivendi on the margins, a viaticum for surviving in a society where “a homosexual’s life is wretched”. During the casual discussions, laden with astonishingly picaresque events from the past, the portraits of the leader and her costume lady challenge sexual identity and social norms in a society whose muffled violence explodes during the almost sacrificial sequence of the fire.

Charlotte Garson