At the beginning of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, three men witness a devastating motorcycle crash, to which they react with varying degrees of shock and indifference. This isn’t a spoiler. In fact, it’s relatively difficult to spoil anything that happens in director Pham Thien An’s debut feature film, a beguiling three-hour drama that rebuffs easy classification in either genre or format. But this opening salvo, presented in an elegant five-minute long take, succinctly communicates what An’s film will spend the next nearly three hours exploring: this is a story about death and the various ways in which we seek to fill the absences it creates with meaning. There is a preponderance of people who use faith as a tool to overcome death and its inexplicability. By extension, religion is often used as a way to provide structure and reason to the otherwise uncertain paths that life can take, providing a foundation, however uncertain, to its omnipresent fragility. This marked tenuousness, between order and disfunction, is felt throughout Cocoon, a film composed of assured and meticulously arranged imagery that nevertheless always feels on the edge of breaking into a million pieces.
Thien (Le Phong Vu) may not realize it at the time, but the motorcycle crash he witnesses has claimed the life of his sister-in-law, Teresa. His 5-year-old nephew, Dao (Nguyen Thinh) was present at the crash, but has mysteriously survived without a scratch. As the boy’s closest relative, Thien must take care of Dao, and journeys with him into the Vietnamese countryside, in order to arrange and attend Teresa’s memorial service. Returning to the rural village of his upbringing, Thien is gradually confronted with the various unresolved questions that have nagged, almost invisibly, at his consciousness, preventing him from realizing his own sense of purpose. These alternately involve an old flame, Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), who has since become a nun, as well as his long-lost brother, Teresa’s estranged husband, who had abandoned the family several years before her death. It’s an oblique narrative that slowly reveals itself as the film goes on. Thien is as unaware of himself as the viewer is of him, and it’s only as he begins to ask questions of his identity do we realize the extent to which he, as well as the audience, have become lost.
Even by the most generous metrics of “slow cinema,” Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is extremely drawn-out, both for better and for worse. The closest formal comparison might be to the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Memoria), a Thai filmmaker who composes his films almost entirely in extended long takes. Make no mistake, this is an arthouse film, and makes precious few concessions to the expectations of an impatient audience. As with Weerasethakul, Pham Thien An is more interested in exploring the subliminal portions of his narrative than he is the literal ones. Oftentimes, the film will fluctuate between past and present with little indication as to when the transference took place, such as in a sequence where Thien goes for a walk, only to gradually wander into a memory of him and Thao when they were both younger. The effect of these temporal transitions is often mesmerizing, though it can also lull the viewer into a sense of passive engagement that borders on sleep-inducing.
Regardless of its challenging structure and pace, there are moments in the film that are simply breathtaking to watch unfold. The movie’s arguable centerpiece, though only 40 minutes into the runtime, is a 20-minute long shot that follows Thien as he bikes with Dao through the winding and dusty streets of the rural village to the home of an old man, with whom he proceeds to have an extended conversation. Aside from the sequence’s astounding technical ingenuity, it also presents a completely unique way of viewing dialogue, since the resulting conversation is captured entirely through a window that’s entrenched in shadow. As of now, it’s the most dazzling shot of the year.
As a director, An is asking the viewer to consider the invisible spaces in between the traditional points of focus, where things are happening that might otherwise go unnoticed in a more conventionally shot film. Most of the visual compositions in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell last around five minutes, if not longer, so the eye is bound to wander to the edges of the frame. Life exists beyond the boundaries of the protagonist’s experience, and it’s refreshing to see a film so resolutely interested in exploring that notion. There’s an assured amount of detail packed into An’s craft that suggests a level of visual mastery uncommon in the work of most debut filmmakers. Even as the film threatens boredom, it never loses its sense of mesmeric wonder.
But it must be said, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is boring. That’s part of its point, but it’s hard to be totally won over by a film that can’t keep your eyelids open. There are interesting conversations to be had as to the story’s interpretation of faith, which always seems to lean on the side of spiritual without ever becoming resolutely religious. It’s a work that engages with questions of mortality, spirituality and purpose as an element of its very being. Even as it steadfastly commits to a confounding and ambiguous narrative, just as Thien accepts the unknowability of his own personal journey, one can find a coherent meaning simply in how the film is crafted. There’s plenty to pick apart here, whether it be baffling, tedious or hypnotic. In the film’s final scene, Thien undresses and lies down in a shallow river, choosing to submit and let the cool water rush over him. In many ways, the film is asking us to do the same.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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