Why a Domestic War Movie Failed to Win Over Vietnam’s Communist Youth

It all began with social media. No one would have expected “Peach Blossom, Pho and Piano” (Đào, phở và piano), a government-funded war drama, to become a box-office phenomenon. Released on the first day of the Lunar New Year, 10 February 2024, the film tells a love story of two young volunteers who died in the fight against the French in the battle to defend Hanoi (December 1946 to February 1947). Curious about the history of their own hometown, many young Hanoians started sharing TikTok and Facebook posts about the film. Soon, lines formed in front of the city’s cinemas, prompting the government to take notice.

The sudden surge in online chatter and searches about the film (over 152,000 times within 24 hours on 22 February) took the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism by surprise, but they were quick to capitalise on the film’s popularity for propaganda purposes. Related to this is the fact that the teaching of Communist ideology in schools and colleges has not succeeded in “encouraging devotion to a socialist path” in Vietnamese youth. This has prompted the government and the Communist League (with 5.7 million members) to acknowledge the need to do more, admitted a Communist magazine in September 2022.

Nationalism is another reason for the state to promote the film. For decades, the most famous war movies about Vietnam were made by foreigners, each with their own take on Vietnam’s history. A French example is the Oscar-winning “Indochine” (1992). Hollywood had exploited the Vietnam War to such an extent that American director Francis Ford Coppola said at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival that his “Apocalypse Now” (1979) was not just “a film about the Vietnam War” but “is Vietnam”.

Keen to use a war narrative against foreign aggressors, an important part of propaganda legitimising the Vietnamese version of Communism, the government launched a massive state-financed campaign in February to publicise “Peach Blossom…”, targeting Vietnamese students. Tickets were discounted for school pupils and then made free to attract more young cinemagoers in some provinces. By mid-March, the film seemed to lose its appeal but the government kept pushing it. The film will be shown again in October to mark the 70th anniversary of Hanoi’s liberation from French occupation in 1954.

Young Vietnamese were urged to watch the film so they could further “nurture revolutionary ideals and loyalty to the Communist Party and the motherland”, said local media. The propaganda machine was so much in overdrive that even the legal restriction on nude scenes in movies for schoolchildren under the age of 16 was lifted. In the film, the lovers spend a night together before their last battle.

Paradoxically, the film’s narrative is not built on Communist ideals.

The propaganda even extended to foreigners in Vietnam. Exchange students from Laos and Cambodia were offered free tickets. A newspaper reported that Oraiden Manuel Sabonete, an African exchange student, earned praise not so much for his on-screen role – he was one of a few foreigners playing French legionnaires in the film – but for his apparent admiration of Vietnam’s political system that he considers better than that of his homeland, Mozambique.

Paradoxically, the film’s narrative is not built on Communist ideals. Directed by Phi Tien Son, an East German-trained filmmaker honoured by the government, it struck a chord with many cinemagoers because it evoked the lost memories of an old, bourgeois yet patriotic Hanoi before North Vietnamese society was forced to undergo a Maoist indoctrination campaign after the Anti-French war in 1954-55. The title connotes the city’s cultural symbols – peach blossoms, pho noodles, and Hanoi residents’ love for piano music. Colonial French culture was visible in the film, such as a song by Edith Piaf and a Catholic wedding, which is not typical of propaganda movies in today’s Vietnam.

If the short-lived online popularity of the film tells us anything, it is that “Peach Blossom…” was a missed opportunity for Vietnamese cinematography. The film told a compelling story but its production – in this author’s view – was rather poor. A Facebook reviewer complained that the film “looks like a war drama on Chinese provincial television depicting Chinese Nationalist soldiers fighting Japanese troops. Even the uniforms don’t look Vietnamese.” Heroism was pushed to the point of absurdity: in one scene, the female lead flew five metres in the air from a rooftop while carrying a heavy lunge mine onto a French tank in a kamikaze-style attack against the enemy.

War movies used to be an important state undertaking in Vietnam. Liberation Film Studio, founded in 1962 at the height of the Anti-American War, made over 100 films and 300 documentaries for the state before it turned commercial in 2010. The last large-screen war film produced by the state-backed Vietnam Film Studio was “The Flavour of War” (Huong vi cuoc chien) in 2012.

Today, 80 per cent of Vietnamese are under 29 years of age and their love of romance, comedy and horror films dominates the market, worth US$150 million in 2023.

Instead of exploiting “Peach blossom…” for short-term gains and wasting public money to publicise it, the Vietnamese government should think big again and invest in film studios if they want to produce high-quality war films. At the moment, Vietnam does not have an established film studio making big-budget films, as one newspaper lamented in 2022. 

The government’s excessive use of the film for propaganda purposes drew some negative reactions. When asked, “Do you feel proud and patriotic [because of the film?]”, some Facebookers on a film review page responded mockingly “Yes, very much!” with attached collages of photos of former government officials at corruption trials. Too much state propaganda may backfire because patriotism, even in the form of cinematic art, must be earned, not forced on Vietnamese cinemagoers.

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