Lê Bảo’s feature debut Vi, translated as Taste, follows the lives of four Vietnamese women and a Nigerian immigrant in Ho Chi Minh City as they perform menial labor and, for the span of several days, live together in an abandoned concrete building outside of the city where they cook, bathe, rest, ruminate. It is when the characters come together in the concrete building that the film culminates in its surreal, poetic density: a scene, a single image, seems to stand in for the memory of an event or a life’s worth of experience. Taste is nothing short of entrancing, effervescent—it’s reminds us that a film’s visual beauty can be absolutely arresting but difficult to put into words because words, ultimately, are not film’s primary medium.
Taste presents two impressions of living: to live is to strive for what is possible, yet it is also to just continue living—to persist, in some nominal way, one day to the next. This dual quality lends the film its imaginative, visually arresting style, while never losing an eye for the unflinchingly human.
Taste asks: How does the body hold memory? What are the physical postures and gestures one takes when avoiding or dissociating from a memory, and how do those postures and gestures themselves express remembrance? Rooted in Lê’s observations while growing up in Saigon, Taste is a distillation of faces, lived emotions, and body language connecting past to present. One woman, Trang (Le Thi Dung), has not seen her husband and son since they went missing years ago; she keeps her son’s chamber pot as a memorial. This scene and others bring to mind what Theodor Adorno writes of art and remembrance: “it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”
Taste is a constellation of scenes and images in which four Vietnamese women and a Nigerian ex-footballer man share a brief time together; it is also a visually stunning study of bodily form, movement, expression.
I sat down virtually with Lê and translator/producer Thao Dong to talk about Taste following its debut in the 71st Berlinale, where it won The Special Jury Award in the Encounters lineup.
NOTEBOOK: Your film suggests that bodily form may be a more direct, more immediate form of expression than a verbal or textual one. I wonder if this is something you were thinking about in making this film.
LÊ BẢO: What you said is the most important thing, to care about the images in the film, especially the shape of bodies and the positions of each character, especially the movement of people in small spaces when they live together. When I was in pre-production, I managed very precisely the position and shape of characters in the frame. And then when I was on set and looking at everything through the monitor, I tracked how fast or slow characters walk, stand up, lie down, all movement, even the smallest movements or breathing. You know that this film has no music, so the movement of the actors is the film’s musical score.
NOTEBOOK: A single image in Taste can feel like an allegory for an entire conflict, conversation, event. I’m thinking of the image in which Bassley is looking at his son, wrapping the hair dryer cord, or the scene with Trang and Bassley near the film’s end. There’s a poetic density in how Taste condenses narrative into image. Does this feel like an accurate description of how you thought about building the film’s visual language?
LÊ: You are right when you mention the importance of images in this film. When we shared film stills with the producers, they said that they feel very stunning and interesting. But even though each image is quite strong, the question was how do we connect these images in a good way? This process took a long time. In the time I was waiting for money to make this film, I worked with artists to sketch and paint some of the scenes I had in mind. In this drawing process I thought a lot about position, movement, so when I got on set I knew exactly the core of each image. Each image has the core of each human: their desire to share their emotions, to show their love, and at the same time, a desire to keep back their desire, to hide.
NOTEBOOK: So while you were waiting for funding, you were sketching and having scenes painted in advance. Did you show the actors these drawings to help direct them?
LÊ: Yes. All the actors in Taste are non-professional actors, that’s why I found other ways to talk to them and did not just give them the script. When I shared with them the film’s story, I shared the sketches to help them understand the scenes, what they would do, and what it would look like. It was really useful to have this time to work with my actors.
NOTEBOOK: It’s illuminating to hear how essential visual sketches were in the pre-production process. I had wanted to ask how much visual art was an influence in constructing your film’s mise-en-scène? In asking about your influences, I’m aware that how such questions are framed to you from a western audience may be western-centric. While wary of this bias, I couldn’t help but think of paintings by Vermeer, or Dutch still lifes, in how Taste uses natural light, color, texture.
LÊ: I’d like to share with you the emotional roots of my film’s visuals. I know that when most people watch the film they might wonder, oh, this director is influenced from this painter or that filmmaker in Europe, but actually the film’s roots come from my own life. I grew up in the slums of Saigon and everything in my cinema, from the colors, light, texture, smell, position of people, everything, comes from my own life, from the memories of when I was a little boy. One example I can give you is when I lived in the slums of Saigon, every house was very small and electricity is low, so lighting can be quite dark in interior spaces. I remember the feeling that this lighting and color left on me. A second example is that the reason why the movement and position of people are so important in my film, and how they relate to emotions, is because when I was in the slums, I waited for my mother and father for long periods of time to return home from work and I would observe the people who lived around my home by the river. I remember the color, wind, the smell of the river and it still impacts me very much: the way jobless people would look at the river, how they would look around, the way they hold their bodies in a position for very long periods of time. It impacted me a lot, so when I thought about the kind of story I wanted to tell through cinema, these are the visuals that appeared in my mind.
NOTEBOOK: I don’t think it’s too large a generalization to say that in western cinema, beauty is often understood in terms of transcendence—that cinematic beauty is that which exceeds, overcomes, negates the everyday. Yet in Taste, the relationship between image and thought denies transcendence. People defecate, scale fish, eat, watch tv. The scenes are grounded in the concrete, the common—yet otherworldly.
LÊ: This is a difficult question. When the characters are living in the abandoned house together, it’s true that what they do is what people do in real life. In fact, everyone uses the bathroom and watches television. These are familiar, everyday things. But the actors do these familiar things in an unfamiliar space, in another world, in a dream world that builds over time. The sense of dreaming does not come immediately from the beginning of the film, but it comes gradually from each character. In this space we can see everything as it is in real life, but in special expressions of feeling and movement. Why every detail in the film can be both realistic and part of a dream world, like people eating, cooking, laughing together, is because they do not happen often in real life. When I lived with my parents growing up, it was very rare, really, that my family could gather and eat together, so the moments that people can gather and share food, these are dream moments for me. I put aspects of everyday life into the film’s dream world because that’s how I experience them in my own life, as things I dreamed.
NOTEBOOK: Emotional and physical space is so interlinked in Taste. Could you tell me a little about the architecture and design of the concrete space in which the characters stay?
LÊ: When I wrote the script, I had in mind a detailed plan of the individual rooms, like the living room and bathroom. When I was in pre-production and scouting locations, I took more time to focus on a suitable dream space. The first thing I looked for is natural light. The way I view space is related to how light conveys the passing of time in a space. I wanted a space to make the characters forget the passage of time.
NOTEBOOK: The actors are naked in many if not most scenes in Taste; this can certainly be a lot to ask of any actor, especially non-professional actors. How did you discuss this choice with your actors?
LÊ: I decided to have the characters naked while living together because those are the rules of the space, the rules of the world they are in. As an artist, you have to break old rules to make the new, and the first rule you have to break is the rule of the self. When the characters step into the shared space, there is an agreement among them to enjoy this world. When I cast the actors for the film, I wanted to feel their emotions, the emotions specific to each character. Because they are non-professional actors, I wanted their emotions to be expressed naturally, especially with the women who had experienced sadness and pain in their lives. The film was a chance for the actors to challenge and express themselves.
NOTEBOOK: In bios of you available online and in your director’s statement for Taste, your place of birth is referred to variously as Saigon or Ho Chi Minh city. The city’s two names refer back to Viet Nam’s history of struggle with western militarism. I’m wondering if the difference between Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City as names is something that crosses your mind, that matters to you, personally or as a filmmaker.
LÊ: Actually, indeed, as you know in history the place in which I was born harbors two different names that’s related to the history of Viet Nam. This history does not impact too much on my generation, and I did not want to talk too much about this history because it relates to painful moments for the people of Viet Nam. Like many people in my generation, I am respectful of both the painful and happy history of Viet Nam’s past. With regards to Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon, it’s very natural—sometimes I call Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon my birthplace because Ho Chi Minh City is quite long to say and Saigon is very short, so it can be more convenient to say. For example when you say “I’m coming to Saigon” it can just easier and more convenient to say instead of Ho Chi Minh City.
NOTEBOOK: I appreciate the education. On the topic of translation, I’m interested in the Vietnamese title of your film, Vi, and its translation into English as Taste. In English, taste most often refers to food, but can also relate to one’s capacities for appreciation or understanding. I’m wondering what you had in mind in the film’s title in Vietnamese, Vi.
LÊ: You’re asking about the meaning of taste in Vietnamese versus taste in English. Yes, you mentioned that when people normally talk about taste, everyone thinks about the feeling you have from food. But this feeling comes from the tongue, so even when we think of taste as related to food, this definition is connected to the tongue. This is important to me because you need the tongue to speak out. Without the tongue, you cannot speak. You may have something in your mind, and even if you don’t speak it out, your tongue is still aware of it. This is quite abstract, but it is essential to the feeling of my film.