“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell”: a spiritual quest
The complex dance of doubt and religious faith is frequently cast in terms of a quest. One might be “on a faith journey,” or be “a lost soul,” or be “searching” for meaning and the divine — all images derived from the idea of starting at one place, keeping your eyes open and ending up, ultimately, in some final destination. Small wonder that many human cultures imagine a wander in the wilderness, literal or metaphorical, as pivotal to one’s initiation into maturity. Some fresh wisdom and revelation come from walking around in circles for a while.
This spiraling, meandering trek is the underlying structure of “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” an uncommonly strong feature debut from Vietnamese director Pham Thien An. The protagonist, Thien (Le Phong Vu), is dragged into a voyage of his own. Having grown up in a rural village, he now lives in Saigon, where he works and hangs out with his friends. It seems that any faith or belief in the soul or the transcendent has disappeared completely into his hard, cold urban exterior.
But one day, sitting at a roadside cafe discussing faith with two buddies — one of whom is selling his possessions and moving to the countryside to seek a life of communion with the divine — he observes a terrible motorcycle crash.
Initially, he thinks little of the crash. You get the sense he’s seen a lot of this sort of thing before. But soon after, while he lies on a table in the early stages of an erotic massage, his phone rings. “God is calling,” he tells the masseuse. “God?” she asks. “It’s my client,” he replies.
It is not his client. It’s also not God, though it might as well be. Instead, it’s news of the death of his sisterin-law, who leaves behind a young son, Dao ( Nguyen Thinh). Thien’s older brother Tam is the child’s father, but Tam abandoned his family long ago. Thien is, effectively, the next of kin. He’ll need to take his sister-in-law’s body back to the village for burial and is, at least for now, in charge of Dao.
This tragedy seems to shake loose something deeply buried in Thien. As he tells his friends, he wants to believe in something, in God, in faith itself. “I’ve tried searching for it many times,” he says, “but my mind holds me back.” Faith stalks him, nonetheless. His sister-in-law was Catholic, and her funeral vigil is laden with religious imagery. Thien’s former girlfriend is a nun in the village, teaching in a school.
But Thien does not find
God in these places. He finds frustration and loss instead. He also wanders, looking for Tam and encountering unusual messengers — a war veteran, an old woman with a neardeath story, former friends, former acquaintances, strangers who fix motorcycles and serve tea. Each has something to say to him, none of it consistent. These encounters might simply be coincidental, or they might be missives from some transcendent being; it depends on your perspective.
Perspective plays a key role in “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” a movie whose title recalls the idea
of being unable to see beyond the walls of a small, tight place. (The film evokes most strongly the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though Pham’s voice is entirely his own.) Thien shoots and edits wedding videos for a living and is used to watching people over and over, making the small mishaps disappear so that people’s memories of their most important moments might be more pleasingly preserved.
His own memories, though, are less pleasing, more troubling. Pham layers flashbacks into the film so seamlessly that it’s easy to miss that they’re flash
backs. Thien remembers the moment his relationship with his girlfriend ended and when he found out that his brother had abandoned his family. But he also seems to remember long motorcycle rides down the road in Saigon, perhaps in his dreams.
Pham uses his camera in wide shots and slow, fluid pans and zooms, suggesting the presence of an allseeing eye keeping tabs on Thien. But he leaves up to our imaginations the actual order and meaning of events. The point here isn’t to tell a straightforward story; at times, it’s unclear if we’re seeing the pres
ent, the past or a dream. It’s to travel in contemplation, revisiting feelings and thoughts and doubts with new perspective, like the spiral of a shell. To that end, mirrors and reflected faces pop up constantly throughout the film, as if reminding us that nothing we are looking at is a simple surface; something always lies beneath. Pham manages to float existential and spiritual questions into Thien’s consciousness and ours without trying to offer solutions, at least in language. The problem of evil — if a good God exists, then why do bad things happen — is raised and remains unanswered. Thien’s quest for Tam, prompted by worldly concerns, starts to seem more like a hunt for salvation, and it’s noticeable. An older woman looks at him and straightaway diagnoses his problem: “Have you forsaken your soul?” she asks.
In this, she is referring to the Bible, which she later quotes explicitly: “You tell me, for what shall it profit a man if he save the whole world, and lose his soul?”