A superbly wrought saga of loss and survival, "Journey From the Fall" follows a family and some friends from their escape from Vietnam and the fall of Saigon to their eventual arrival in Southern California. Vast in scope yet carefully nuanced, Ham Tran's film represents a major accomplishment.
The U.S. production made primarily by South Vietnamese immigrants opens today in two Orange County theaters, a sure-fire attraction in the heart of the Vietnamese American community but richly deserving of wider exposure. Tran, who co-produced and wrote the film with Lam Nguyen, made it not just to mirror the experiences of his fellow emigres but also to convey to the widest audience possible the ordeal most of his people experienced in having to flee their homeland and build new lives in a radically different culture. It is a remarkably ambitious debut feature for Tran, a UCLA film school graduate.
An example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted, "Journey From the Fall" powerfully illustrates the refugee/immigrant experience. It is not the first film to deal with the plight of South Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnam War; its predecessors include dynamic Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui's "Boat People," released in 1983, and Oliver Stone's overwrought "Heaven and Earth," which opened in 1993. "Journey," however, is one of the most comprehensive and accessible.
After the fall of Saigon, Long Nguyen (played by an actor of the same name) stubbornly, even nobly but certainly foolishly, refuses to leave Vietnam, out of his loyalty to the fallen South Vietnamese government and a desire to continue in some undefined way "to fight for his country." He orders his wife, Mai (Diem Lien), his mother (Kieu Chinh) and small son, Lai (Nguyen Thai Nguyen), to flee by boat. For much of the film, Tran cuts between the hellish experience Long endures at a brutal communist reeducation camp and the horrific ordeal his family experiences as boat people. "Journey From the Fall," with Thailand standing in for Vietnam, is an often shimmeringly beautiful film that constantly juxtaposes tenderness and kindness with depictions of savagery and brutality, enriched greatly both by Guillermo Rosas' plangent camerawork and by Christopher Wong's evocative score.
