spectacle, show, play The film follows a loyal Viet Cong double agent (Hoa Xuande) known only as “Captain” who struggles to keep the North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and the CIA happy while working as an operative in the United States. This is a work depicting misfortune. His mission was originally to infiltrate South Vietnam and obtain information that could be supplied to the North. He did this so successfully that he became aide-de-camp to the general in charge of the South Vietnamese secret police (Thuan Le). He even took up residence in the general's house. Also He deceives an American operative named Claude (Robert Downey Jr.), who recruits him from a young age and trains him in CIA interrogation tactics. When Saigon falls and the general flees, the captain “runs away” with the general on orders from his childhood friend Mang (Duy Nguyen), a North Vietnamese military counterintelligence officer. Mang (Duy Nguyen) wanted him to monitor the general's activities in America.
To pull all this off, you need to be fairly fluent in multiple ideologies and persuasive enough to act like a true believer. Sadly, most of the captain's rise through the ranks and his more sophisticated espionage work takes place off-screen. By the time we meet him, he has become damaged and strangely incapable of projecting anything resembling the ideological purity his profession requires. This may be attributed, in part, to the Kafka-like nightmare of being imprisoned on one's own side. The story finally begins in a re-education camp in North Vietnam. Instead of the hero's expected welcome, the captain is thrown into a sweltering cell, where he is ordered to write a “confession'' that will form the basis of the show. “Start at the movie theater,” says one of the prisoners.
The captain is not. Instead, he writes a line like this: Sleeper. ghost. A man with two faces. I was cursed to see every problem from both sides. I was a communist agent planted in the South. ”Whether he realizes it or not, it's a small act of rebellion. Not only this, do not have Start with the movie theater. First and foremost, he. Instead of a confessional tailored to the party's ideological framework, he is writing a memoir.
It's not the first time. The captain has already wasted (we know) A whole year He was unable to produce testimony to prove to his peers that he had been successfully “reeducated.” Instead of producing a bare-bones, properly reflective document that includes details that his superiors claim are suppressed, the captain can't help but get carried away. metatext. Maudlin. He continues to present conspiratorial and sentimental drafts to the revolutionaries, so baroque and dramatic that the director Commander-in-Chief (whose editorial interventions are peppered throughout the series), at one point They mocked him for ending his confession about the barbarism of the West, a “cliffhanger.”
If this sounds two ticks crazier than it needs to be, you already know something important about “The Sympathizer.” That said, the tone is a little off for audiences who expect certain things from a spy thriller or an American story about Vietnam. I think it is right and natural that a dedicated communist who served loyally to the Viet Cong would eventually become a prisoner of the Viet Cong. This is the tragedy of the widespread anti-communism that Americans expected and produced. But it's hilarious that the captain's punishment is a series of Sisyphean meetings with a fussy and unsatisfied editor. In this way, the show progresses by superimposing highly amusing predicaments on top of loosely schematic situations that we can (and should) recognize as very serious, even dire. . It's not the form of violence we expected.
Xuande does a heroic job of grounding these competing tones and humanizing the somewhat schematic web of contradictions that gradually paralyze his character. The captain is said to be a double agent in more ways than one (though perhaps once too many). Half Vietnamese and half French, he has been brutally rejected by the Eastern and Western worlds, but must still master and learn to navigate. After his mother passes away, the only ties he has left are his two childhood best friends, Bon (Fred Nguyen Khanh) and Mang. Bon fights for the South. A man fights for the north. The captain secretly sides with Mann and openly sides with Bon. His position remains torturous and tentative. He is an ideologue who must be appeased, compromised, and confronted. A true believer who can never profess. Caught between north and south, east and west, friend and friend, he cannot fight. The only weapon available to him is a neutralized form of diplomacy.
This is a spy thriller. In other words, the characteristics of a double agent are: I don't fits And he's also a bit bland, only intermittently effective, compared to the spies we see in the movies, anyway.
From the beginning, “The Sympathizer'' shows that it shares with its protagonist an impulse to rebel against the genre it is meant to deliver. After all, this is a television adaptation of a book. Still, the novel cannot stop talking about or mentioning the genre it specifically (and brutally) satirizes: film.Indeed, the series In theory This film understands its mission. It obligingly dedicates an episode to a withering parody of “Apocalypse Now” and “Hearts of Darkness,” a documentary about the making of that film, and makes a few points about Asian representation. But like the protagonist (this is the theme!), he can't help but betray a secret attraction to his supposed adversary. The show, also packaged as a movie, begins with the soothing sound of a projector and the flickering of specks and dots. You may have seen it in a 70's movie. “Let's start with the movie” may be the mantra for this program (and its captain). Both set up interrogation scenes that take place in empty movie theaters, shoehorning in references to “Death Wish” and “Emmanuel.” Of course, everyone can comment on the theatricality of the scene.
At its best, the show subverts expectations from unique angles, plunging into anti-climaxes that promise shock or catharsis, and vice versa. At least surprisingly, this document declares its clear intention to restructure: “In America they call it the Vietnam War. In Vietnam they call it the American War,” it begins. While this is true, there is a whiff of a spirit of retaliation that Americans would rightly fear. Or, at the very least, it requires an active commitment to American policy. story Crimes against Vietnam will be reversed. And in fact, this show offers a hilarious version of just that, with an Asian actor playing Robert Downey Jr. as exactly the kind of depthless generic villain he often plays in American movies. His roles include CIA agent Claude, a bald orientalist professor, a condescending senator bent on fighting communism, and an unstable writer. Having him play all these roles feels like a really good nested joke, right along Revanchist lines. )
But at its best, the show surprises viewers with layered portrayals of people we don't expect to see portrayed in layers — such as the General, whose crimes are grave, but Lee's He plays a person who is confused, despairing, unstable, and depressed. Or Sophia Mori (Sandra Oh), a Japanese-American woman who struggles to relatively mildly integrate some of the same mixed-race characteristics as the captain. Or the South Vietnamese officer the captain ends up killing in order to maintain cover. His amiability and fit of generosity may make you (and the captain) forget some gruesome activity in which he took part. Of course, this is the pun at the heart of the title. Communist sympathizers develop such widespread sympathy that they humanize their enemies., I distract him by putting my friends first. Mission.
These pesky shades of gray, the series' best, inevitably fade away as the plot progresses. The last episode is inferior compared to the first three episodes (directed by Park Chan-wook). That's not an accusation. Perhaps it was inevitable, as the show's extraordinary visuals and narrative confidence sought to reconcile the ideological schemas in which its characters operated with the wonderfully troubling stories about them that it produced. .
sympathizer It will premiere on April 14 on HBO and stream on Max, with subsequent episodes airing weekly.