Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

In a bonus feature in fluent English, Vietnam-born (UCAL grad) writer-director Minh Nguyen-Vo speaks of his long-time fascination wit two stories from the collection "Scent of the Ca Mau Forest" by Son Nam. (Ca Mau is the southernmost province of Vietnam) that he adapted into “Buffalo Boy” (Mua len trau, 2004). I have no idea of what in the film, set in the late-1930s, comes from which story. In my viewing, there is the story of the supposedly 15-year-old Kim (Le The Lu, who went on to star in “Owl and the Sparrow”)) and his ailing father, Dinh (Nguyen Huu Thanh) who used to be a lead water buffalo herder, the story of Kim’s first drive (not to market as in Howard Hawks’s “Red River,” but out of the flooded plains to fodder for the animals that are regarded as bodhisattvas) under the leadership of a harsh taskmaster Lap (Vo Hoang Nhan), who learned how to lead buffalo migrations from Kim’s father, the story of an independent second drive that includes encountering his partner Der’s (Zan Sram Kra) wife Ban (Thi Kieu Trinh Nguyen) and young (5ish) son, and a third about settling down with an old couple who take Kim in. This last one connects with the first one. And the movie is framed as the elderly Kim telling about his youth to his grand-daughter.

Probably, not all Vietnamese movies are as beautifully languorous as those that have made it onto the international art film circuit (“The Scent of Green Papaya,” “Vertical Rays of the Sun,” and “Buffalo Boy”). Kim tells his grand-daughter that the land where he grew up was flooded half the year and smelled strongly of mold when the waters retreated (and rice was grown with water buffalo plowing the fields). Movie viewers can’t smell the mold. In any case, the land is submerged in almost the entire movie. Besides showing moving water buffalo across flooded land, the movie has a lot of rain. It is the wettest (though not soggiest) movie I’ve ever seen, displacing Tsai Ming-Lin’s “The River.”

The standing and the falling water are beautifully shot by Yves Cape, and underlaid by lyrical mood music by Ton That Tiet. I find the unmarked jumps in time disconcerting, but the movie always looks good, including its unexpressive, often shirtless protagonist, the tall Le The Lu. Though Kim is telling his story in the frame, he says nothing of his motivations back when he was coming of age Not that I had difficult in imputing motives for what he did. Ban’s motives  are more of a puzzle to me.

The movie is not a simple-minded rural idyll. The water glistens fetchingly, but the water buffalo on which the people’s livelihood depends are in danger of starving, and there is fierce (i.e., violent) rivalry between gangs driving the buffalo to food (grass). The heretofore sheltered boy is introduced to alcohol, marijuana, and awareness that Lap rapes at least one woman on the first drive. And Det’s wife is very attractive… and has the resiliency of Howard Hawks movies’ female characters, though not their verbal dexterity.

©2011, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD