‘Memento Mori: Earth’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Marcus Manh Cuong Vu. Vietnam. 2022. 85mins

The shadow of death hangs heavily over Marcus Manh Cuong Vu’s feature-length debut Memento Mori: Earth, which chronicles the tragic demise of a 27-year-old woman with a poised delicacy that can shade into preciousness. Set and shot in the scenic coffee-growing Da Lat regions of hilly rural Vietnam, it walks a hazardous line between the tearful and the lachrymose, although sensitive viewers who succumb to its ethereal spell will find the film an emotionally moving experience.  Premiering in Busan’s New Currents, this is an 85-minute exercise in whispering poetic intensity. Further festival play may follow for a picture which, opening titles inform, is “inspired by the book Destination of Life by Dang Hoang Giang.” 

Flashbacks combine freely with hallucinations, dreams and fantasies

This card is immediately followed by another which cautions us that “smoking harms your health,” although the relevance of this to the film’s storyline remains opaque. Indeed, the ailment afflicting Van (played by an actress billed as “Red”) is never specified in the dialogue; the end titles pointedly dedicate the picture to “all cancer patients and their families.” As the film begins, Van is bedbound and unable to feed herself, the latter duty undertaken by her adoring husband Hoang (played by “Kim”.) In flashbacks — which combine freely with hallucinations, dreams and fantasies via Le Hoang Phuc Nguyen’s fluid editing — we see Van in slightly better health, performing household duties, looking after her two young daughters, and toiling in the coffee groves.

The latter was where Van’s own mother died, also aged 27, as the result of a workplace fall. Her father (Kim Long Thach) is clearly traumatised at the prospect of losing his only child, and is vehemently aghast at her wish to donate her organs — specifically her corneas — for posthumous transplant. The reasons for this opposition never quite become clear, but the resulting frictions do at least provide a little narrative energy in a film which is usually content to noodle along in a mode of forlorn torpidity.

The only other significant plot element concerns youngish coffee-plantation owner Kien (Thanh Tung Huu), to whom Van and Hoang are in financial debt. Van’s Christianity (very much a marginal religion in Vietnam) is referred to from time to time, and there are periodic inserts of a rural church — but nothing much is done with this intriguing ethnographical/anthropological angle.

Reportedly the first in a series of films (Manh Cuong Vu is currently working on Memento Mori: Water), Memento Mori: Earth excels with its depictions of the natural world — an image of Hoang sitting beneath a huge vermilion-flowered tree is a real showstopper — and in its celebrations of traditional rural practices, including the preparation and consumption of food. But, underpowered plot-wise and populated by thinly-characterised protagonists, even at 85 minutes it gives the impression of having been padded to achieve conventional feature length.