By Clarence Tsui, Hollywood Reporter
Nguyen Hong Diep’s first full-length film zeroes in on a pregnant teenager confronting the mundane realities of inner-city life in Hanoi.
Screenshot of ‘Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere’ (Hollywood Reporter)
A pregnant teen turns tricks to get cash for an abortion; the basic premise of Nguyen Hoang Diep’s feature-film directorial debut might seem well-trodden, but it’s the style which propels Flapping in the Middle of Nowhere into heights dizzier than its apparently hackneyed synopsis. Poised in its mise-en-scene, poetic in employing visual panache and precise in capturing details which hint at the harsh realities of inner-city life, Diep’s film offers a sensitive, sensual and surprisingly candid representation of sexuality and adolescence in Vietnam.
Even before bringing her debut to the Venice’s Critics Week sidebar and then Toronto, Diep could already boast of exposure and experience on the festival circuit as producer of Phan Dang Di’s award-winning Cannes-bowing 2011 title Bi, Don’t Be Afraid. With Flapping, Diep should finally find some deserved acclaim for an approach which combines audacious realism (in its portrayal of juvenile delinquency) and leaps of artistic fantasy. In spite of its multinational co-production status, Flapping doesn’t toy with cultural exotica as such; instead, it offers a story about young protagonists struggling to exist, never daring to dream of futures which seem unattainable anyway.
At the center of this narrative is Huyen (Nguyen Thuy Anh), a rurally-bred teenager who has left her home village to attend college in Hanoi. Unbeknownst to her parents, she is involved in a relationship with Tung (Hoang Ha), a feckless boy who spends all his street-lamp repairman’s salary on cock fighting — an obsesssion which lands the couple in trouble when they need cash for Huyen’s abortion. With Tung having fled home to evade his debtors, Huyen — with the help of her transgender housemate Linh (Thanh Duy) — turns to escort work for cash, only to find herself meeting (and then falling for) a kind, generous and (of course) hunky client Hoang (Tran Bao Son), who is seemingly more interested in her feelings than her body.
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