Director – Tran Thanh Huy – 2019 – Vietnam – Cert. 12a – 79m
*****
An urban street kid works as a lottery runner to survive while a slightly older boy attempts to steal his turf – from the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), on now
Spending his nights alone in his slum rooftop shack under the stars shooting tin cans with a catapult, young teenager Ròm (Tran Ahn Khoa) must live by his wits. The tenants of his block, like all the city’s residents, are obsessed with the lottery, the only chance any of them have of getting out of poverty. He spends his days going around collecting bets, racing to place them with the bookies on time then racing back equally fast to deliver the results as soon as they’re announced.
If the numbers win, people collect their money and he’s a local hero. If they don’t his customers may beat him up. It’s a challenging and desperate lifestyle, right down at the bottom of the social pile, yet a part of him seems to thrive on it, almost like some indescribable, youthful affirmation of life.
In the course of trying to impress the local, pool playing gangster, older homeless teeenager Phúc (Nguyen Phuc Anh Tu) – who took his name from a Westerner he worked for some time back who used a simiar sounding word a lot – attempts to muscle in on Ròm’s customers and turf. The older boy uses all manner of dirty tricks to achieve this, and at various points in the narrative one is taken prisoner or incarcerated somewhere by the other. At others, they appear to be best buddies, but it’s never more than a superfiacial truce between the pair of them.
With the block’s residents the ongoing targets of property developers who want to clear them out so that they can realise lucrative building projects on the site, employing youthful baseball bat-wielding thugs to make it happen when the locals won’t play along.
The representation of the kids, the streets and the block on the screen are a marvel. Bright eyed Tran Ahn Khoa’s Ròm, restlessly energetic, carries the film while Nguyen Phuc Anh Tu’s secondary role keeps the whole thing moving when Tran Ahn Khoa is offscreen. The sequences of racing to collect and deliver the bets and winning numbers show Ròm evading and jumping over numerous obstacles of street furniture at a breakneck pace, captured by Nguyen Vinh Phuc’s versatile cinematography with its effortlessly dizzying racing around and slanted camera angles. Each of the kids storms up balconies and rapidly negotiates walkways as the action requires. Their rivalry eventually leads to some fearsome hand-to-hand fighting, with the pair of them at one point having at each other on train tracks in a cutting as a train approaches.
All this is augmented by both Ròm and Phúc’s customers, among them the elderly Mrs Ba (Thien Kim) who trusts Ròm enough to wager everything she has and more and the bereaved Mr. Khac (Mai Tran) who holds off placing a bet until the good omen of Ròm finding the missing grave of one of Mr. Khac’s relatives (following a terrifying sequence where the boy is trapped in the grave, little more than a deep pit in the graveyard into which he has inadvertently fallen, in torrential rain). A further intrigue involves Ròm joining Phúc on the latter’s tiny, makeshift raft as he takes him to visit a potential customer in a ramshackle house across the river.
There’s a breathlessness and immediacy about the whole, which benefits greatly from the exuberance of its young lead and the extraordinary urban locations and camerawork. Yet at the same time, it’s a searing indictment of like at the bottom of the social pile. It ends with one boy rapidly pursuing the other, both on separate, open air walkways, as the camera races alongside them to keep up. It’s a piece of work that grabs you from the get-go and never lets up, and as such deserves to be seen much more widely than on the festival circuit.
Ròm plays in LEAFF, the London East Asia Film Festival.
Trailer:
London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) programme (please click links):
Official Selection, Competition, Hong Kong Focus, Documentary, Retrospective,