Word: coutard
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...Raoul Coutard's Hoa Binh begins on the outside. Its first shot is a map of East Asia, and there is the Vietnam of our mind's eye, a twisted banana fastened to the Asian underside. The map gives way to images of American soldiers, transporting weapons, rescuing the wounded, and patrolling the jungle. Still, it is Vietnam from without, seen through Western eyes, in terms of bombing targets, helicopter landing zones, bars and whorehouses...
This documentary-like introduction goes on for several minutes, and then there is a delicate but crucial shift of focus that signals a complete change in the film's perspective. Coutard's camera is following an American jeep traveling down a Saigon street; suddenly, through an adjustment of the camera lens, the jeep is gone, and attention is fixed on a Vietnamese bicyclist. From that moment the film has stepped inside the Vietnam War. The frame of reference is wenched from the Americans and returned to the Vietnamese...
Over the past ten years, Raoul Coutard has achieved a reputation as one of the world's great cinematographers. In that time he has worked for almost all of the noted French "New Wave" film makers (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, among others). This is his first directorial effort, and it would seem that his technical background would incline him toward a stylistic self-consciousness. But Coutard is too sure of himself to feel a need to demonstrate his proficiencies. His direction is efficient rather than ostentatious. His concern is with narrative, and the narrative is rigourously simple...
...Coutard, the skeletal narrative often seems no more than a backdrop for his arresting images. He is at his best looking at Saigon through the children's eyes as they wander through a nightmare city that has been torn by war but is still bursting with luxurious restaurants and gaudy nightclubs. Coutard seems to share the children's wonder and confusion. There is one especially moving interlude in which they huddle around a sidewalk movie machine to watch an old Fernandel film...
...chubby and cute Vietnamese children who play the leads hardly look as if they had been savaged by the war. Yet, if Coutard has been rather sloppy about realism, he is scrupulous in avoiding propaganda. He refuses to take sides. Hung overhears an American defending his country's participation, and later, when he is taken to a political meeting, listens to a member of the N.L.F. explain its ideology. Both speakers are persuasive, and both promise victory. For Coutard, obviously, politics pale beside a single human imperative. In Vietnamese, hoa-binh means "peace." · Jay Cocks