Saigon Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Bullet in the Head
(Diexue Sietou,
喋血街头)

Director – John Woo – 1990 – Hong Kong – Cert. 15 – 126m

*****

Three teenage friends forced to leave Hong Kong by a gang war find themselves in the middle of the horrors of war-torn Vietnam – back out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 29th, and out on 4K UHD on Monday June 22nd

John Woo’s American canon never quite produced anything comparable to his earlier, groundbreaking Hong Kong actioners which, as well as being much more violent, possess a stronger emotional core – perhaps none more so than Bullet In The Head, a Far East Asian cross between Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978) with Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986) thrown in for good measure.

Arguably Woo’s most personal HK outing, falling as it does outside the cop / triad actioners for which he’s best known, it was originally intended as a prequel to the two A Better Tomorrow films (1986, 1987) Woo made with producer Tsui Hark. However, following creative differences, Tsui retained megastar (and Woo onscreen alter-ego) Chow Yun Fat for A Better Tomorrow III Love and Death In Saigon (Tsui Hark, 1989) while Woo took the material and developed it on his own, acting uncharacteristically as his own producer.… Read the rest

Monsoon

Director – Hong Khaou – 2019 – UK – Cert. 12a – 85m

****1/2

A man who has lived in England for 30 years returns to Saigon and Hanoi to discover the Vietnam his late parents left behind – in cinemas and on Vimeo, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon and elsewhere from Friday, September 25th

Saigon, present-day Vietnam, when bicycles and motorbikes swarm along the roads like purposeful, scurrying ants. Kit (Henry Golding) returns there in an attempt to discover the Saigon and Hanoi of his childhood before his now deceased parents left for England 30 years ago. He checks into the posh area of town, putting the wooden box containing his mother’s ashes on a bare shelf in his sparsely furnished, luxury apartment.

High tech housing blocks give way to the less affluent and more traditional blocks where most urban Vietnamese live. Kit meets with Lee (David Tran), with whom he remembers playing as a child and to whose family Kit’s mother loaned a considerable sum of money to help them start a small business, now a small mobile phone shop. Lee wants to repay the loan to Kit.

Kit goes on an English language tour in an attempt to track down some of the places from his childhood, but so many locations have changed or disappeared.… Read the rest