E-Mail This Article to a Friend BUFFALO BOY

Rural 1940s French Indochina is a fitting setting for a film that spurns the Hollywood æsthetic increasingly symptomatic of Vietnamese cinema. This unassuming tale of a teenage buffalo herder explains a bygone way of living in which the animals’ labored movements functioned as life’s clock. Too poetic and elliptical to be concerned only with social realism, director Minh Nguyen-Vo paints his peasant characters in artfully cast shadows. Luscious daytime river crossings alternate with candlelit camaraderie, playing tricks on your pupils to create a hypnotic rhythm. Minh is interested above all in contrasting the scales of time approximate to humans and their environment. The French and Japanese occupations (the tide of human history) loom only in the far distance, cast as transitory elements of this ecology. In contrast, water serves as the film’s metaphor for an epic time, a force that returns "as always, nourishing the land, but rotting everything, man and buffaloes." In Vietnamese with English subtitles. (102 minutes)