‘The Sympathizer’, or Park Chan-wook rewriting, to the rhythm of restrained black humor, the Vietnam War

Between 1955 and 1975, the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong—and supported by China and the Soviet Union—fought the government of South Vietnam, whose main ally was the United States. Joined. The fall of Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—in 1975 put an end to a war that, if studied in journalism universities, is because it was the first in which public opinion played an essential role. American society rose up, from a distance, against its country’s participation in the conflict – inevitable, in the middle of the Cold War -, unable to believe everything it read and saw about what was happening there. At the end of the sixties, when the movement hippie broke out, the days of the Vietnam War were numbered. Above all, thanks to him, but not only.

The wear and tear of a war that was from the beginning a guerrilla war earned the United States a defeat that the country experienced, however, as a victory, or, at least, that is what American public opinion, which had faced the senseless that their kids would travel to the other end of the world to die in a war that, they told themselves, had nothing to do with them. The amount of fiction that has been written and filmed about her since is overwhelming. The first, Apocalypse Now, by Francis Ford Coppola, was released just four years after the war ended. And the feeling was that the world had given American fiction, even without history, a myth to which it could return again and again, and, as in the real world, play at being the good and the bad at the same time. time. And do it from a single point of view.

That’s why the premiere of the miniseries The sympathizer (HBO Max), the first television production by Park Chan-wook, the director and screenwriter of oldboythe film that made Korean cinema fashionable almost two decades before the world discovered Bong Joon-ho and his Parasites, it matters so much. Because here for the first time, the story, as in a mirror, turns upside down. And what you see is, for once, Vietnam. And life not in the rice fields, which the almost industrial cliché of Hollywood cinema has abused, but in the cities. Cities with their cinemas, and their premieres in the cinemas, and their bars, and the beers that are drunk on crowded terraces on the same day that Saigon falls because everything is finally going to end. That is, a part of reality that had never existed for fiction. And fortunately, it now exists.

Based on the novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016, The sympathizerthe miniseries—directed by Park Chan-wook and written alongside Canadian Don McKellar—follows the footsteps of an unreliable narrator, an undercover communist agent. Ripleyian —an apparently harmless, submissive and charming someone— who, while helping the pro-American General escape from Saigon —on the day of the city’s fall, in a single plane full of family members and acquaintances furious at leaving almost everyone on the ground —, he writes to a senior Viet Cong official to report on every last ridiculous move by the General, and, by extension, the United States. And in his journey another scenario is built in which the Vietnam War is the United States War – that is how it was known there – and in which the world that stops is not that of the well-off Woodstock attendees but rather the one that is being attacked.

The tone is one of a restrained, slightly macabre black comedy—being, as it is, Chan-wook, the guy who turned the hammer into an instrument gore and that twisted the idea of thriller even the artistic in that oldboyand what followed—so much in the style of Joseph Heller—the author of the war classic Catch 22, a monument to the absurdity of war—that it almost seems as if Yossarian, the main pilot, was dictating script lines to Hoa Xuande, the infiltrated spy, the narrator (known as the Captain), who, and here is the interesting thing in more In one sense, he is writing the story in a horrible cell, in a future where he has been discovered. This makes it even more evident how history is rewritten all the time, and how the person who writes it decides what matters and what doesn’t, and in what sense the details sometimes construct smokescreens.

There is a unique vision of the United States, which begins with the desert and continues with a motel, and settles in the suburbs, and even behind the counter of a liquor store, because it is a liquor store that the General sets up in Los Angeles. It is a vision based on mythologization, a mythologization that soon reveals itself to be made of papier-mâché—pure scenery. empty—which, in the hands of Chan-wook—whose pulse here is attenuated, at times unrecognizable, so focused on the portrait that it obstructs itself—makes it most incisively interesting. Because there is the dream, what has been fought for, in the dark, without seeing it, in Vietnam, come true, and it does not have the same appearance, of course, not even, at times, it resembles it in the slightest.

The star appearance of Sandra Oh—unrecognizable and masterful in her role as a secretary whom her racist boss considers Japanese because of her appearance, despite the fact that she insists on telling him that she is as much from California as he is, which highlights the great problem of the United States—and Robert Downey Jr.—in a small and wonderful number of absurd roles: attentive to the chameleonic aspect of his appearance, he is always where you least expect it—has just catapulted the device into, if not a cult piece —because there is something in its mechanism that does not allow it to shine, and it is that certain rigidity as a non-existent and necessary piece, it is the weight of responsibility—yes, another enjoyable side especially suitable for lovers of espionage, and the absurd .

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