Unlike the Western-made films that have regarded Vietnam as a hellish, bewildering landscape, a terra incognita in which American soldiers are set adrift, Ho Quang Minh’s Karma regards it as home.
The Hanoi-born Mr. Minh, now a naturalized Swiss citizen, made his film in and around Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now named, working with a Vietnamese cast and crew. Deserts and beaches are seen here more frequently than the predictable jungle scenery, and the film’s psychic landscape is as unconventional, at least by Western standards, as its a physical one.
The war is remote in this drama set between 1968 and 1972 (and based on a Vietnamese short story entitled The Wounded Beast by Nguy Ngu, who co-wrote the screenplay). But its effects are inescapable, and they can be seen everywhere, particularly in the embittered face of Binh (Tran Quang), the story’s hero.
Binh, once missing in action and presumed dead, has returned to find that his beautiful young wife, Nga, has betrayed him and has become a bar girl who befriends visiting soldiers. Nga and the other bar girls seen in the film seem bored, aristocratic and coolly contemptuous of their companions, again in opposition to the usual cliches.
Karma has been described as ‘Platoon turned inside out,’ but there’s a touch of television soap opera to it, too. As Nga, Phuong Dung is glamorous but amateurish, and she seems to be summoning thoughts of dead puppies when the screenplay requires her to grieve for Binh’s lost love.
The dashing Tran Quang is better, but it’s difficult to make this small, melodramatic love story support the entire weight of the war. The film’s incidental scenes, like those showing life at the bar or the process by which Binh’s genteel family is forced from its home in the name of relocation, are much more successful than those concentrating on Binh’s rage and Nga’s regret.
If an American influence manifests itself in the soap-opera aspects of Karma, there are also attempts at Japanese delicacy, particularly in the final symbolic representations of Nga’s remorse. More impressive than the occasional artiness of Karma (it begins with a dream sequence set in the dunes) is the velvety black and white photography, which is exceptionally fine. – The New York Times [08.07.87]