When the Tenth Month Comes
1984, directed by Đặng Nhật Minh
The first half of When the Tenth Month Comes concludes with Duyên performing a scene in a Chèo play. Mirroring her own history, she bids farewell to a husband going off to war. Unbeknownst to most of her audience, Duyên has recently lost her actual husband in the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, and the emotional reality of the scenario causes her to break down, aborting the play. What happens next is a key to the whole film.
Roughly ten seconds after the film’s precise midpoint, the impresario peeks through the curtains to address the audience: “Please keep calm! The disruption has put an end to our opera, and it will be followed by a comedy show.” The dual significance of his words is invisible, as no audience can be expected to grasp their structural import. Who would think, even in retrospect, that the film itself also shifts here from tragedy into comedy? There’s not much to laugh at in the second half. On the contrary, Khang gets into trouble and has to leave the village; Khang’s girlfriend Thơm is heartbroken; Duyên’s father-in-law dies; her little boy Tuần learns that he’s lost his father; and Duyên succumbs to her grief after holding it back for many days. Nevertheless, if we take the impresario’s words as an implicit viewing suggestion, an unexpectedly uplifting side of the film opens up.
It’s always a bit dubious to put much weight on the exact timing of events onscreen. Such things may be a window into a filmmaker’s constructive process, but they’re not accessible to a viewer who isn’t simultaneously following a clock. Nevertheless, in this case we’re already immersed in a scene that obviously reflects the surrounding plot – the Chèo play echoes Duyên’s story – so that we don’t need a timer to imagine a double meaning in the impresario’s announcement as well. The symmetry isn’t necessary, but in this case it’s too remarkable to ignore.
Not only is the line about switching to comedy so close to the exact middle – but also, about ten seconds before the precise midpoint, we find an earlier iteration of the same line: “What should we do now?” “Replace it with a comedy show! Hurry up!” This line is spoken backstage, in private, under duress; its second version is addressed to the public with a smile and a lively face. In other words, the statement is first serious then comic, mirroring the very transition that it refers to.
In classical Western dramaturgy, a comedy is defined broadly to encompass stories that end happily. The ghost of Duyên’s husband tells her he only wishes for the living to be happy, and there’s enough reconciliation at the end to leave a hopeful feeling. More than that, the second half of When the Tenth Month Comes is filled with the sorts of misunderstandings, scandals, and pettiness that usually make material for a comedy. There may not be anything overtly funny in the schoolchildren passing around a drawing of their teacher, or in Thơm’s jealousy, or in the villagers’ suspicions of an affair, but the latent potential for comedy in all this melodrama is not hard to see.
The film may not be comical enough to prompt laughter, but its inflection point is bracketed by two scenes of laughter. First, when Duyên runs backstage leaving her co-star confused on the stage, the audience’s tears of sympathy quickly turn to outright laughter, foreshadowing the impending shift in tone. Second, immediately after Duyên leaves the stage, she runs to the temple where the “village god” greets her with warm laughter, again signalling the new tone. The children’s drawings in each half are another structural marker: Tuần’s pictures of farm animals, soldiers, and guns are tokens of death, while Sửu’s sketches in his notebook and in the classroom are the closest the film comes to making jokes.
This implied shift into comedy is subdued enough to escape conscious detection, yet its effects are meant to reach everyone watching. When the Tenth Month Comes is above all a form of therapy for a nation suffering from decades of war. From the nationally shared experience of grief, the film transports Duyên with great care back to a taste for life. The tonal shift midway through is neither simple nor sentimental. Though the first half is heavy with grief, it’s lighter in tone as the characters are friendly to each other. It’s also ironic that Duyên’s path to hope in the second half comes at the expense of her desperate hope that Nam remains alive. Only at the climactic death of her father-in-law, when she sees Nam in the soldier who knew him, does she mourn her husband without restraint. Even after she had cried on stage, she had asked the village god whether Nam was still living. Accepting his death is necessary for her healing.
The shift from tragedy to comedy is not a genre shift. Genre is more forceful… it tries to sway emotions. If we see the latter half in the mold of a comedy, it’s only because we consent to do so. The impresario’s cue is only a suggestion to look at things – the story, and by extension life itself – from a brighter perspective. Whether we catch his suggestion and accept it or not, most viewers will probably intuit a turn for the better in the final scenes. Tuần begins flying a kite, as his father used to do, instead of playing with a gun; he’s on the cusp of starting school; the village now understands that Duyên and Khang had done nothing wrong; and Thơm hints that Khang is probably waiting for Duyên. Even Thơm finds a sort of resolution when she welcomes Tuần as her student. By caring for the boy who’s dear to the man she still loves, she finds an outlet for that love.
The film’s title comes from a poem written by Khang, and it refers to a time of well-being when rice is harvested. We’re also told that Tuần starts school in October, so that the film ends at that fortuitous time, and that’s the point – whatever life takes away, it should be possible to believe that good times may someday replace our hardships.
Although Khang writes to Duyên that “nothing can replace those who have passed away,” a principle of replacement guides the film’s storytelling and editing. Khang replaces Nam, first in the act of writing and then, by implication, in Duyên’s heart. Khang appears to Duyên in the temple as if replacing the village god, and then in the market on the magical day of July 15, as if replacing Nam’s ghost. The image of Nam replaces the soldier near the end, who in turn had replaced Nam at his father’s bedside. There’s a paradox in all this, but it’s true to life. While it’s impossible to replace a lost person, new relationships fill the void anyway. When Thơm takes Tuần as a student, the boy can hardly replace her lover, but life’s energies find new channels that compensate for the old ones. The switch from tragedy to comedy also fits this pattern of substitutions.
Even more subtle than the impresario’s cue at the film’s center is another substitution that develops out of what we might call the film’s MacGuffin – the kite. The kite is first introduced in a flashback, a scene Duyên recalls during a visit to the village temple under the roots of a large tree. Her husband Nam had been fond of flying kites, and she teases him for his childlike pastime. When Nam burns the kite at the temple to please her, he also announces his enlistment in the army and his family’s preparations for their marriage. In three ways, therefore, the moment represents his growing up. Later the village god will offer the kite back to Duyên, but instead of her taking it we’re told that Khang has made a new kite for Tuần, this time inscribed with his poem containing the film’s title. What had earlier been a token of childhood has now, therefore, been resurrected as a token of new life ahead.
When Tuần first flies his new kite, the scene ends with the object framed entirely by the sky. The shot cuts to the school, with the national flag of Vietnam centered between the trees. The second time Tuần flies the kite, it cuts to the final scene with children soon carrying the flag of Vietnam to their first day of school. In the final shot, the flag is framed against the sky just as the kite had been a few shots back. The flag, therefore, in replacing the kite, has a dual meaning – it’s a more grown-up substitute for the kite, and it’s an embodiment of the well-being that the kite had promised.
CONNECTIONS:
Earth – Pattern of replacements; symbolic object in the sky at the end that replaces a prior image
Early Summer – Child’s balloon or kite in the sky associated subliminally with the national flag
Ordet – Story of death and grief that can be viewed alternately as a comedy
The Eighth Day of the Week – Title points to a fortuitous time when things will be better; film addresses a nation ravaged by the trauma of war
All About My Mother – Acknowledgement of the paradoxical impossibility yet inevitability of replacing loved ones