The Town Within Reach (1983) is a breathtakingly elegant work of visual poetry. Reminiscent of Andrzej Wadja’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Đặng Nhật Minh’s film follows Vū (Tất Bình), a Hanoi-based journalist who returns to the city of Lang Son at the end of the Sino-Vietnamese War. Filmed after the withdrawal of Chinese forces, the war-ruined landscape becomes a theater where Vū’s memories mingle with the devastation and violence of the present to create a gentle yet bracing cinematic elegy.
Shot on moody black-and-white film and based on Minh’s own short story, The Town Within Reach begins in properly reflective fashion, with Vū on a train bound for the border under the cover of night. As the locomotive rolls through the darkness, Vū recalls his lost love, Thanh (Quế Hằng), and how they parted amidst the creeping specter of Chinese influence and political persecution. In three delicately woven timelines—-the present, the distant past, and the recent past—-we see Vū and Thanh’s youthful romance, and how it ended when suspicions about her absent father’s political affiliations arose. In the more recent past, we see Vū returning to Thanh’s hometown, now a bombed out skeleton of what it once was. Yet he searches for her as the fighting continues around him. As Vū makes his way through the ruins, familiar places evoke memories that force him to confront his dismissive attitude toward impending cultural and political realities, as well as how he has prioritized careerism over love. In the present, Vū arrives at the border town where Thanh is teaching and eventually finds her. Peering through the darkness into her window from outside, his journey through the past comes to a poignant end.
Using slow motion, disjunctive sound, and haunting, carefully chosen images, Minh’s film collapses time into a single, uniquely cinematographic, psychological present. When Vū becomes lost in a memory from better days in Lang Son, we see happy faces on screen, until Minh employs a freeze frame and the sound of gunfire to remind us of the horror of the present. When Thanh and Vū part, we are offered an image of two empty clothes hangers quietly hanging side by side. It’s the expertly choreographed dance between stark, formally discursive techniques and pure poetic expression that makes The Town Within Reach such a moving and impressive work. Minh’s film doesn’t shy away from the potentially ugly side of revolution, but it’s in the way that he masterfully pairs affairs of the heart with the political and ideological conflict that make it so resonant. The political is the personal in The Town Within Reach, and there is no love and no freedom without daring.
The Town Within Reach screens tonight, October 27, at Metrograph as part of the series “Memories of a Vietnamese Cinema.”
