Beneath the cinders of war-torn Vietnam, a team of young Viet Cong’s etch out a life amongst the gloom of a complex network of tunnels, hidden from bombs and bullets and the blinding sun. But not the light, never their light. Tunnels: Sun in the Dark screened at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival.
1967. A hamlet in Cu Chi, northwest of Saigon, is blackened, burnt and skeletal, the ground scorched for miles as Americans drop relentless bombs. Among the devastation, a lone Viet Cong, Ba Hương (Hồ Thu Anh), patrols a river strewn with the floating pale bodies of her comrades. But in the silence there’s suddenly movement: she shoots, and a young man surfaces, quailing with a bamboo breathing pipe in his mouth. His name is Tu Dap (Quang Tuấn), and as he quivers, now under her command, he tells her their mothers were friends, and they were once, as kids, betrothed. He tells her that he has been looking for her.
Their relationship becomes the first of many understated intimacies beneath the bombings, each interwoven around a team’s central mission of protecting an intelligence group’s radio communications inside the tunnels that have become their home. Their lives, and their waiting for it to be done, simply happen in the meantime. Untrusted by many, Tu Dap collects unexploded American artillery, melting them down to make rudimentary mines. Despite his being held on the periphery of tunnel life, Ba’s relationship with him steadily grows as her comrades laugh, celebrate, plan, support and tease each other in their dens. There, under the soil and roots of the blackened trees above, youthful play, family bonds and friendships continue to thrive. They are victims of the war, not just participants in it.
Based upon real events, Vietnamese director Bùi Thac Chuyên’s fictionalised portrayal of the Cu Chi tunnels and the operations that took place is as sprawling and disorientating as the tunnels it depicts, for better and worse. It’s rare and refreshing to see the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese perspective, and it’s done with such reverence for the finer details and dynamics of the true events that it feels both intimate and expansive.
Shot in a narrow 2.75.1 aspect ratio, Tunnels: Sun in the Dark feels rightly claustrophobic and breathless. The tight spaces and sense of secrecy are rendered utterly palpable throughout its two-hour run time, lending to a surprisingly immersive experience. The tunnels evoke the dens and hiding spots of childhood; we become familiar with them, each hallmarked with memories of conversations, glances and moments of camaraderie and connection. This only heightens the terror when these tunnels are eventually breached and no longer act as protection. Chuyên excels at creating and sustaining this tense atmosphere throughout the film. He understands the mercurial nature of the tunnels as both safe spaces and potentially dangerous ones, and constantly tests the boundary between them by including the ever-present reality of the bombs above in every scene. The walls shake, the ceilings buckle. All that lies between them and the bombs is the mere earth.
The cinematography works mostly in harmony with this all, never straying far from the characters or giving them space, but at times this can make scenes vague and difficult to decipher. Transitions and cuts from one scene to another can sometimes lack causality, resulting in confusion. In moments of action, of which there are many, this isn’t an issue; in fact, the climactic scenes are brutal, fantastically choreographed and genuinely harrowing. In less capable hands, these more action-oriented segments would clash with the rest of the film, but here they feel entirely of the same essence.
Each explosion and gunshot, each tank and helicopter, feels like a counterweight to the characters’ interpersonal lives. They complement and balance the film, not only giving each moment a sense of weight but also a sense of tragic inevitability that heightens each small moment of closeness. Chuyên should be praised for this skilful blending of action and character; it stands out and makes much of the film feel true in a way few war dramas do.
Tunnels: Sun in the Dark’s greatest strengths and weaknesses lie in its characters, for as well rendered as they are, they ultimately lead nowhere, lack development, and can at times feel random in construction. Chuyên tries to juggle multiple subplots at once but ends up sacrificing each of them to the other.
There is a disappointing lack of focus here, in particular the relationship between Tu Dap and Ba Hương. As performances, both are amongst the strongest of an already strong cast. Each of their scenes, brief as they are, is rendered with such softness and subtlety that they seem to belong to another film. They touch, they linger, so much is left unsaid. Their relationship is shown, in isolation, in beautiful scenes of tentative and guarded attraction that feel true and aching. They almost make one forget the lack of development between them. For when viewed over the course of the film, these scenes collapse under their own peripherality. They feel aimless, tacked on, left as vestiges of an afterthought.
Their relationship reaches a crescendo of disappointment when, at the end of the film, they undress and have sex while the tunnels are bombed. They are shown wrapped up in some dreamy billowing sheet, and its suddenness is comical and clichéd, draining all the previous scenes of their greatness. It not only betrays the characters but the entire film’s reality, undercutting it all with a hollowness that makes one question the rest of it.
“The tunnels – the people’s war,” one character tells the Americans as they loiter around his wounded body, filming him as he smokes his last cigarette. And it’s true: the tunnels represent the power, ingenuity, and bonds of people against the hulking, hell-bent machine of war, a theme the film should have focused more on. Overall, Bùi Thac Chuyên’s Tunnels: Sun in the Dark is a film of great potential lost in its own tunnel, bewildered by the paths before it and never choosing one.
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