Glorious Ashes is a stand-out Vietnamese film, especially with Vietnamese cinema in the state it's in. (The state: a movie scene dominated by sprawling special-effects-driven "blockbusters", many of them starring celebs and models with few acting skills.) Director Bui Thac Chuyen has tried to make a serious movie about some complex, adult issues (troubled marriages, conflicting passions, with some genuine madness and redemption in there too). And he has succeeded. Succeeded, of course, in creating a film that has won international awards. Succeeded too in throwing down the gauntlet to other Vietnamese film makers: challenging them to try to show the world how normal Vietnamese people ACTUALLY LIVE, rather than presenting them with horror or action extravaganzas copied from Hollywood or Korea, with a few random Vietnamese costumes or cultural traditions thrown in for effect.
I would expect most Vietnamese movie-goers will find Glorious Ashes tough to watch though. It's 2 hours of slow-moving, slightly disjointed scenes from normal life in Ca Mau province - about as far from the fast-paced experience of most Vietnamese city folk as you can get. I liked it because it was slow-moving in a good way: full of scenes where the audience has time to observe the small details of country life and is invited to reflect (reflect on the visual details s/he can see and on the meaning of the strange events the film depicts). In a way the bitsy character of the narrative, taken from 2 different stories by Vietnamese writer Nguyen Ngoc Tu, has some of the texture of real life, which never, or rarely, presents itself to most people as a tale with a strong story-line.
The roles Bui Thac Chuyen has asked the cast to play were VERY challenging (a husband who NEVER SPEAKS to his wife, a wife whose husband compulsively sets fire to their house, a criminal who becomes a Buddhist monk to make up for his sins at the end of his prison sentence...). All were played VERY capably. But a special mention goes to Juliet Bao Ngoc Doling for her part as the wife of the surly husband. Doling's character is close to the centre of the film virtually from start to finish. Her voice narrates part of the story. Her physical labours are a physical constant. And her painful efforts to elicit some sort of expression of emotion from her hopelessly repressed husband are symbolic of the attempts by the women in the film to understand and communicate meaningfully with the men in their lives.
Altogether, an impressive piece of cinema from a very promising Vietnamese director.
