By Peter Keough

Faith is a very elusive thing in the transcendent Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Directed by Pham Thiên An. Available at Kino Lorber and all major VOD platforms.

Vu Ngoc Manh, left, with Le Phong Vu in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Photo: Kino Lorber

In contrast to the grotesque evangelism that seems to have hijacked political discourse these days, a quiet trend of genuine religiosity has emerged in some recent films. They partake of the quality referred to in the title of Paul Schrader’s 1972 The Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. To the works of those three giants of cinema mentioned in the title one might include Wim Wenders’s new films Anselm and Perfect Days, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul, Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, not to mention Schrader’s own oeuvre. And transcendence permeates Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, the three-hour-long debut feature by the young Vietnamese director Pham Thiên An.

It begins inauspiciously as three young men at a beer garden in Saigon discuss faith and rationality. “How come you’re still superstitious in this day and age?” asks the most skeptical of the three. He demands a response from Thiên (Le Phong Vu, who, like the rest of the cast, acts in the passive, evocative style of Bresson’s “models”). To his interlocutor’s disgust, Thiên replies, “I want to believe but I can’t. I’ve tried searching for it many times but my mind won’t let me believe.” But then they are interrupted by an intrusion from the quotidian world — like the shout in the street in Joyce’s Ulysses — as a crash and cries of alarm come from outside the frame. The camera slowly dollies towards a scene where vehicles and bodies lay crumpled and sprawled. “Come see, there’s a child!” someone says.

The accident proves prophetic. Later, in a less philosophical encounter, Thiên is about to have a happy ending with a masseuse when his cell phone rings. “God is calling,” he quips. He answers and hears that his sister-in-law has been killed in an accident. When he arrives at the hospital he learns that, once again, as with the crash at the beer garden, there is a child — the dead woman’s little boy Dao (Nguyen Thinh), the son of Thiên’s brother Tâm, who had abandoned his family and disappeared a few years before. “Where is my mom?” demands Dao. Thiên is evasive and distracts his nephew with a card trick – he is an amateur magician who earns a living as a professional videographer. His tricks, as well as the filmmaker’s, become more impressive as the movie continues.

In one scene Thiên passes his hand over a pitcher and two goldfish appear, a fair imitation of Christ’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes. Fancy stuff, but he still can’t provide a satisfactory answer to the boy’s — or his own — questions. He takes Dao and the dead woman’s body back to their native village, Thiên’s hometown. It is a return that confronts him with his past, including a meeting with Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), an old flame who has since become a nun (despite the Communist regime Catholicism apparently still has a strong presence in Vietnam).

Their awkward reunion inspires more discussion of matters of belief and longing, introducing a flashback to better times when as lovers they played a game of hide-and-seek in an abandoned building, a sequence shimmering with a Tarkovsky-like aura of immanence. But otherwise this relationship is one of the more weakly imagined parts of the film. Saying farewell to Thao, Thiên leaves Dao in the care of the school where the nun teaches. Heartbroken, he passes out in a karaoke bar (his reflection in a mirror fragment is one of many of the movie’s understated but indelible images), and then sets off on a borrowed motorbike to find his brother, a quest that is also a search for the faith that he desires but still can’t accept.

An shoots almost every scene through a frame or frames within frames, through doorways, windows, or other apertures, or through variations of veils or draperies. It is as if the truth lies just beyond. He also illuminates the film with understated, numinous references to Catholic iconography, such as a tiny, sickly bird Thiên picks up from the ground and which he nurses, however briefly, back to health – an allusion, one of more to come, to the Holy Spirit appearing as a dove. And, after the film’s title appears on screen, half an hour into it, a cut is made to the sister-in-law’s sad coffin in the back of a van, suggesting that this is the cocoon from which eternal life will spring forth.

In another extended scene, Thiên chats with the old man who made the dead woman’s shroud, listening to his war stories about fighting against the Viet Cong. He shows Thiên the scar in his side where he was shot and Thiên puts his finger into it — a reference to doubting Thomas and the risen Christ. It is an image almost identical to Caravaggio’s painting of that Gospel story. Such moments of epiphanic mystery — evocative of Thiên’s passage to an uncertain realization — break through the film’s lulling, meditative pace, which is sustained by way of long takes and slow, revelatory pans and tracking shots. As reality and illusion blur, they are intimations of the spiritual lurking beneath the mundane that nudge the protagonist on his path to belief – or its renunciation.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).