Orphans of the War

By JAY COCKS

Hoa-Binh is the first feature film to be directed by the superb French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, 47, who has photographed much of the work of Godard and Truffaut. Made entirely in Viet Nam during 1969, the movie is full of scenes of severe beauty: gas-masked soldiers outlined against a metallic sky, actors in elaborate Oriental costume running from a bombed theater, whole rows of huts bursting suddenly into flame.

The plot is often, unfortunately, simplistic. A little boy's father leaves home to join the N.L.F. His mother dies soon afterward of an infected leg, and Hung and his little sister Xuan are left orphans of the war. A neighbor appropriates the money left for the children's care and mistreats them. So Hung and Xuan leave the neighbor's house for Saigon, and after a multitude of hardships are finally taken in hand by a kindly nurse. Xuan is placed in a children's clinic; Hung gets a mining job and visits his sister every night; eventually their father returns to Saigon.

For Coutard, the skeletal narrative often seems no more than a backdrop for his arresting images. He is at his best looking at Saigon through the children's eyes as they wander through a nightmare city that has been torn by war but is still bursting with luxurious restaurants and gaudy nightclubs. Coutard seems to share the children's wonder and confusion. There is one especially moving interlude in which they huddle around a sidewalk movie machine to watch an old Fernandel film.

The chubby and cute Vietnamese children who play the leads hardly look as if they had been savaged by the war. Yet, if Coutard has been rather sloppy about realism, he is scrupulous in avoiding propaganda. He refuses to take sides. Hung overhears an American defending his country's participation, and later, when he is taken to a political meeting, listens to a member of the N.L.F. explain its ideology. Both speakers are persuasive, and both promise victory. For Coutard, obviously, politics pale beside a single human imperative. In Vietnamese, hoa-binh means "peace." . Jay Cocks

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