Nostalgia for Countryland

With four excellent movies behind him, there's no doubt that Dang Nhat Minh is Vietnam's foremost director and one of the best in South-East Asia as a whole. But this Japanese-financed film about a farm boy's crush on a woman émigrée who revisits her home village in North Vietnam lacks almost all the qualities which have distinguished his early work: it's soft-edged, easily sentimental, poorly acted and full of obvious padding. This is not the first time that money from NHK (Japan's BBC) has thrown a talented director off course, but it's the saddest example of recent years. The single most interesting moment - the young hero's astonishment when he has his first spontaneous orgasm in the fields - was too much for the Vietnamese censor.