'Father and Son' touches viewers' emotions

The highlight of the Vietnamese feature film 'Father Carrying Son' is the emotional frames, making the lingering echoes from this work just like the sound of fish splashing lightly in the mind.

From April 5, the film Father and Son will officially be released to domestic audiences. This is an independent film project with a very long “gestation” period by director Luong Dinh Dung.

More than 20 years ago, the director and screenwriter was moved by witnessing a son beat his father with a stick until he bled; but the father still forgave his son, insisting that he could persuade his son to come to his senses.

'Father and Son' is a gentle film about father-son love and the lives of the people in the harsh mountainous regions.

The father's patience touched Luong Dinh Dung's emotions, motivating him to write the short story Father Carrying Son, which was later adapted into a script and now has become a film with a fairly large investment, directed by himself.

Due to the time of its release, Father Carrying Son has the color of the 1990s. However, focusing on the theme of father-son love, humanity, the connection between people in the modern world and the natural world; the filmmakers deliberately erased the elements of time and geography, so the film has almost no barriers for the audience to access.

The main settings of the film, from the highlands of Ha Giang to the plains and urban areas such as Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, are all stripped of their identifying elements to become common living environments, where each person faces their own life and feelings.

Specifically, Father and Son revolves around the life of a father named Moc (Ngo The Quan) and a son named Ca (Do Trong Tan). In a small village with rolling hills, the father makes a living by catching and selling fish.

Like all other villagers, they are poor and lacking in material things. Their greatest asset is probably their love for each other and a life in the midst of vast nature where they can let their imaginations roam freely.

The first half of the film has a rather slow pace, perhaps to help viewers gradually integrate into the peaceful life when the sky is clear and the fierce life when the flash flood season comes. The dedication of the film crew in recording the very real scenes of fury from nature and the aesthetic vision of the director and cameraman helped Father Carrying Son have many frames of simple and majestic beauty.

'Father and Son' conquers the audience by gently penetrating the viewer's soul

Once the audience has “entered” the film, feeling love for the sensitive little Fish, and feeling affection for the simple father, the film opens up a new direction. Although there is no dramatic scene throughout the 90 minutes of the film; but that does not mean that Father Carrying Son does not make the audience’s heart ache.

When money and material things are not things to worry about, what meaning does life have when people are robbed of their greatest asset, a living space filled with love and pure nature, especially loved ones?

Right from the beginning of the film, the director portrayed the silent, soul-crushing pain of a woman who lost her husband and son in a flash flood. Now, that loss is at risk of repeating itself to Ca and his son when the boy falls seriously ill. The audience witnessed the simple yet beautiful happiness of the father and son.

For Cá, his father is the one who will take him to a place of shimmering light, to reach his lofty dreams. And for his father who works as a fisherman, his only little son is his whole sky.

The amateur child actors are the soul of the film.

Instead of finding another woman after Ca’s mother passed away, he poured all his love into his son. Yet that incomparable “asset” was at risk of being swept away by the storms of life. In order to cure his son in the city, the father had to catch hundreds of thousands of fish in the mountains and hills - a joke of nature?

After all, the value of the film lies in its humanity and evocative symbolic images. The first valuable image, as the title of the film, is literally the scene when Uncle Mu (who works as a construction worker in the city) carries on his shoulders the children walking up the hill, when the father carries his child up the stairs of the skyscraper...

Another pair of beautiful, memorable contrasting images in the film is the scene of Fish and his father sitting on a log in a blue lake with a flock of white storks flying over it, and the scene of the father and son standing precariously on the roof of a high-rise building in the city. These images make viewers wonder: where is the place where the father and son are happy and belong?

The independent film, which is coming to many film festivals around the world, also makes viewers think about a truly important issue of human beings: love and sharing that each person has for each other. Watching the film, everyone will surely want to hold hands and hug the person next to them.

'Father Carrying His Son' - a lullaby about fatherly love

Parents and children may suddenly realize that they should not waste the remaining days together, before something unpredictable happens. Another small detail, which if the audience pays close attention will warm their hearts, like a “happy ending” inserted by the director, is the scene where there is still a woman waiting for the father and child in their hometown.

According to Phunuonline.com.vn