The spirit of Apichatpong Weerasethakul both inspires and haunts Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, a ridiculously accomplished and confident debut from Vietnamese writer-director Thien An Pham. A three-hour dream-logic odyssey, Cocoon Shell proves Pham to be an immediate maestro of slow cinema, making use of every second of the gargantuan runtime to lull you into his rhythms until the mundane becomes momentous and the line between waking and sleep becomes impossibly blurred.
Our guide through Pham’s world (though he himself can hardly be said to be an expert in this metaphysical terrain) is Thien (Le Phong Vu), a listless young man living in a tiny Saigon apartment and working a low-rent job as a wedding videographer. Detached from both the waking and spiritual worlds, Thien is forced back to life by a sudden death – his sister-in-law is killed in a motorcycle accident (that Thien, unknowingly, actually bears witness to in the first scene), leaving his 5 year old nephew Dao (Nguyen Thinh) without a guardian, with Thien’s older brother having long since abandoned his family.
From here, Thien must leave behind his Saigon life to bring Dao back to his family in his rural hometown, from where he embarks on a likely fruitless quest to find and reconnect with his brother. As is to be expected from the genre that Pham embraces here, Cocoon Shell is hardly full of incident or even conflict – Thien takes to being a surrogate dad to Dao very naturally and though his attempts to rekindle an old flame with his ex Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh) are stymied by the fact she’s now a nun, there remains a warm friendship between them.
Across the first half of the film, this can (when combined with the constant medium shots) feel a little alienating, though never actually boring thanks to some nicely naturalistic performances and the staggering beauty of the Vietnamese countryside, but the entire thing is unlocked by two exquisite sequences dead centre of the story. Playing fast and loose with time and the thin line between reality and the fantastical, Pham gives us a genuinely moving break-up scene that leads to Thien performing some fabulous drunk karaoke, before shifting into a dreamlike silent drive through the early morning mist. I found the almost inexplicable power of these moments to be utterly irresistible, shining a new light on everything that went before while also fuelling the much more poetic back half of the film.
Fittingly for a story that frequently revolves around faith, Pham has a lot of trust in both himself and his audience to along with this slow, opaque journey, and it’s a confidence he really earns – outside of the slightly less sure-footed ending, there’s almost nothing here to suggest he’s a first-time filmmaker. Layered with metaphor and meaning, Cocoon Shell would take a long time to fully unpack, but it also manages to work on an almost instinctual level, defying explanations and revelling in mystery. There’s no denying that this could prove a challenging watch for some, but the rewards it offers are more than worth the effort.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 