DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Downey Jr stars in new spy thriller

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THE SYMPATHIZER MONDAY, SKY ATLANTIC, 9PM

COMMUNIST-ERA Vietnam may not be the most natural of settings for a comedy. But this miniseries adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen is pitch-black in its tone, unflinchingly graphic in its depictions of war and torture, and bold in its narrative choices.

Unusually for a story set around the Vietnam War, it benefits from only having non-American showrunners in Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar. This means it is noticably bereft of jingoism and flagwaving, and instead centres on the human stories at the heart of conflict, regardless of what ‘side’ they are on.

And indeed taking sides is a complex matter here. Vietnamese-Australian actor Hoa Xuande plays The Captain, a North Vietnamese spy working within the South Vietnam army who is forced to flee to the US with his general during the final stages of the war, as Saigon falls.

From his new home among a South Vietnamese diaspora in Los Angeles, he continues to spy for the Viet Cong, giving them information about the community while struggling to determine where his own loyalties actually lie.

Is he truly still aligned with his Viet Cong superiors, or now, halfway round the world and with a new life, does he have more in common with the tightly knit LA community to which he ostensibly belongs?

Complicating matters further is Robert Downey Jr, who plays several roles – all of them antagonistic – including a CIA agent tasked with bringing in the Captain; the Captain’s grad school professor; a Southern California congressman and a filmmaker in the vein of Francis Ford Coppola who is making a blockbuster movie set in the Vietnam War. Xuande hopes the series not only puts Vietnamese people and their stories at the forefront of the Vietnam War, but also explores the ignorance of America media at the time, explaining that certain scenes are “very telling of how the narrative of the Vietnam War has been very one-sided, very Western-centric for such a long time”.

It has proved very popular among Vietnamese American communities; less so among the government of Vietnam.