Word: conge
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...young Vietnamese returns home to his wife one day and tells her he is leaving to join the Viet Cong. The wife, though ill, is forced to work to feed her two children, a ten-year-old boy named Hung and a baby girl, Xuan. Circumstances deteriorate; the village burns, and the family moves in with unsympathetic relatives. After a time, the wife dies of a sarcoma of the leg, and the two children wander through the city, waiting for their father to return. The remainder of the film follows them: shining shoes, peddling newspapers, begging...
...figures of the two children, Coutard is trying to recreate the miscomprehension of a people confronted with political forces which they can scarcely begin to understand. He makes no political judgments; the Viet Cong are seen as brutal as the Americans. And because of this studied impartiality, Coutard already has been accused of a political naivete. That may be true, but it is hardly the point. He is interested in a pre-political consciousness still in the first stages of sorting out events...
...other circumstances the last scene of the film--Hung meeting his father in the street--would be mere mawkishness. But here nothing is resolved; the father must return to the Viet Cong; the war will go on. And any sentiment is quickly swallowed up in the sense of futility...
SOUTH Viet Nam President Nguyen Van Thieu took no chances on the outcome of this week's one-man presidential election. To ensure that the voting would be undisturbed by demonstrators or the Viet Cong, he ordered soldiers, police and armed recruits of the Popular Self-Defense Force to patrol the streets and shoot to kill if necessary. As voters went to the polls, whole blocks of Saigon were barricaded or strung with barbed wire. Thieu also refrained from setting his sights too high; he declared that an even 50% of the vote would give him sufficient mandate...
...that "the exercise of press freedom shall not be harmful to personal honor, national security or traditional morality." That large loophole leaves Thieu free to crack down on his critics. Chief sufferer has been Tin Sang (Morning News), a reputable opposition daily owned by a tough Catholic politician. Ngo Cong Duc (TIME, Sept. 6). The paper has been seized 166 times so far this year, and Duc's home, office and printing plant have been vandalized or fire-bombed five times. Once the best-selling serious paper in Viet Nam, Tin Sang's circulation has fallen by half...