By Sandra Hall, The Age
How to Fight in Six Inch Heels
The anatomy of the hissy fit is exhaustively examined in this comedy about the high-fashion industry in Saigon. It features sparring supermodels maddened by hunger and a team of stylists and designers who are in the bel-canto range when it comes the art of the operatic rant.
The film’s script was adapted from a story by its lead, Kathy Uyen. She and director Ham Tran grew up in California where they got their start in films, but they have since rediscovered their Vietnamese connections.
Uyen now lives in Vietnam, where she has become a star, and Tran made his feature debut as a director in 2006 with Journey From The Fall, a poignantly told tale about an immigrant family forced by extreme persecution to find their way from Vietnam to the US by boat.
How to Fight in Six-Inch Heels finds him dealing with a very different Vietnam – although the story begins in New York where Anne (Uyen) is employed as a fashion assistant by a chronically hysterical designer of limited talent who is rapidly running out of inspiration.
As a result, he offers Anne a chance to come up with a line of her own and she’s naive enough to believe that she’s going to get the credit for it. But things take a turn for the chaotic when her fiance, Kiet (Petey ”Majik” Nguyen), a Vietnamese businessman, breaks the news that he has to spend three months working in Saigon.
Anne is already halfway to being as neurotic as her boss. She’s so controlling that she’s drawn up a highly detailed ”life plan”. And soon after Kiet’s arrival in Saigon, she convinces herself that he’s having an affair with a supermodel. With her life plan at serious risk, she packs her part-finished fashion sketches and sets out to win back her man.
Read the full review by Sandra Hall from the Age.
