Between 1955 and 1975, the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong—and supported by China and the Soviet Union—fought against the government of South Vietnam, whose main ally was the United States. The fall of Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—in 1975 put an end to a war that, if studied in journalism universities, is because it was the first in which public opinion played an essential role. American society rose up, from a distance, against the participation of its country in the conflict—inevitable, in the middle of the Cold War—unable to believe everything it read and saw about what was happening there. At the end of the sixties, when the hippie broke out, the Vietnam War was numbered. Thanks mainly to him, but not only.
The wear and tear of a war that was from the beginning a guerrilla war earned the United States a defeat that the country experienced, however, as a victory, or at least that is what American public opinion did, which had faced the nonsense of their kids traveling to the other side of the world to die in a war that, they said, had nothing to do with them. The amount of fiction that has been written and filmed about it since is overwhelming. The first, Apocalypse NowFrancis Ford Coppola’s The Last Supper was released just four years after the war ended. The feeling was that the world had given American fiction, still without a history, a myth to return to again and again, and, as in the real world, to play at being both the good guy and the bad guy at the same time. And to do so from a single point of view.
That’s why the miniseries premiered The sympathizer (HBO Max), the first television production by Park Chan-wook, the director and screenwriter of Oldboythe film that made Korean cinema fashionable almost two decades before the world discovered Bong Joon-ho and his Parasitesit matters so much. Because here, for the first time, the story, as in a mirror, is turned upside down. And what we see is, for once, Vietnam. And life not in the rice fields, something that the almost industrial stereotype of Hollywood cinema has overused, but in the cities. Cities with their cinemas, and their premieres in cinemas, and their bars, and the beers that are drunk on crowded terraces on the very day of the fall of Saigon because at last everything is going to end. In other words, a part of reality that had never existed for fiction. And that, fortunately, now exists.
Based on the 2016 Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The sympathizerthe miniseries —directed by Park Chan-wook and written with Canadian Don McKellar— follows the steps of an unreliable narrator, an undercover communist agent Ripleyian —an apparently harmless, submissive and charming person— who, while helping the pro-American General escape from Saigon—on the day of the fall of the city, in a single plane full of relatives and acquaintances furious at having almost everyone left behind—, writes to a high-ranking Viet Cong officer to report on every last ridiculous move made by the General, and, by extension, by the United States. And in his journey another scenario is constructed in which the Vietnam War is the American War—as it was known there—, and in which the world that stops is not that of the well-off Woodstock attendees but the one that is being attacked.
The tone is that of a restrained, slightly macabre black comedy—dealing, as it does, with Chan-wook, the guy who turned the hammer into an instrument. gore and that twisted the idea of thriller even the artistic in that Oldboyand what followed—, so in the style of Joseph Heller—the author of the war classic Catch 22a monument to the absurdity of war—that it almost seems as if Yossarian, the pilot protagonist, is dictating lines to Hoa Xuande, the undercover spy, the narrator (known as the Captain), who—and here’s the interesting part in more ways than one—is writing the story in a horrible cell, in a future in which he has been discovered. This makes it even more evident how history is constantly being rewritten, and how the writer decides what matters and what doesn’t, and how details sometimes create smokescreens.
There is a unique vision of America, which begins with the desert and continues with a motel, and settles into the suburbs, and even behind the counter of a liquor store, because it is a liquor store that the General sets up in Los Angeles. It is a vision based on mythification, a mythification that is soon revealed to be cardboard – pure scenery. empty—which, in the hands of Chan-wook, whose pulse is attenuated here, at times unrecognizable, so focused on the portrait that he obstructs himself—makes it most incisively interesting. Because there is the dream, that which has been fought for, in the dark, unseen, in Vietnam, made reality, and it does not look the same, of course, nor does it even, at times, resemble it in the slightest.
The stellar appearance of Sandra Oh —unrecognizable and masterful in her role as a secretary whom her racist boss considers Japanese because of her appearance, despite her insistence on telling him that she is as much from California as he is, which highlights the great The problem of the United States—and of Robert Downey Jr.—in a small and wonderful number of absurd roles: pay attention to the chameleon-like quality of his appearance, he is always where you least expect him—has just catapulted the device to, if not a cult piece—because there is something in its mechanism that does not allow it to fully shine, and it is that certain rigidity as a non-existent and necessary piece, it is the weight of responsibility—, then at least an enjoyable side especially suitable for lovers of espionage and the absurd.
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