Word: coutard
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...most part, Coutard's tone remains one of understatement. He is out to win sympathy not to shock. The war rarely intrudes violently into the path of Hung and Xuan. But it is always in the background--in the insistent beating of helicopter wings or the constant presence of Americans in uniform...
...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...
...Coutard senses--and rightly--that the Vietnam debate is over. The war is still and always a problem, but it is no longer an issue. No one needs to reassure himself any longer on the Vietnam question, and Coutard is not out to score political points...
...restore humanity to a country that has too long been grist for everyone's political mill. Part of the crime of Vietnam has been a failure of visualization. It has been too easy to develop a seven o'clock news mentality that agonizes only thirty minutes a day. So Coutard particularizes circumstances and thus humanizes them. Hung is a kind of Vietnamese Huck Finn, and the acting of young Phi Lan in that role is completely sympathetic...
...even when Coutard falls toward sentiment, when he lingers too long over Xuan crying or exploits an especial cuteness in Hung's expression, it is not so much an indulgence as a tactic. He is playing on sentiment only as a way of striking through the numbness of Western response toward Vietnam...