03/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Vietnamese director Dương Diệu Lính’s debut is a magic elixir of maternal angst, filial rebellion and creature-feature horror

Southeast Asian directors tend to believe in the spirits, yet with Don’t Cry, Butterfly, Dương Diệu Linh is better than others at holding them at bay. After two opening acts making you assume her characters’ superstitions are all in their heads, she incorporates more formal and visual disruption, taking her narrative into a psychologically fraught and hazy place when her colleagues would opt for a simple resolution of transcendence. Yet before this, we feel her film struggling to take flight and captivate us like the butterfly of the title, whose significance is also confirmed at the end. The film has premiered in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week.

Dương constructs the plot to balance on a conflict between a mother, Tam (Lê Tú Oanh), and daughter, Ha (Nguyễn Nam Linh), in a working-class Hanoi household. Maybe unintentionally evoking the storylines of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Woody Allen’s Alice, Tam is looking to bring her philandering husband – whose affair she discovers after glimpsing him with someone else in the crowd at a televised football game – back to marital fidelity, and seeks out a spiritualist-influencer whom she discovers on social media, who prescribes her some holy ash to dissolve into water and imbibe. And this does indeed have an impact, but not on the intended individual.

And what do you know? There’s a generational schism between Tam and Ha: the latter, who wears a pixie cut akin to Faye Wong in Chungking Express, is seeking to study abroad and desert her home country, with the encouragement of her likeable boyfriend Trong (Bùi Thạc Phong), who lives in the apartment opposite her (they both reside in a social-housing complex designed to have a functional, brutalist look, which is thematically quite apposite). And whilst there is a social world enclosing them, and supporting characters like Tam’s middle-aged female colleagues at the wedding venue she works at, the film can feel like an unintentional chamber piece, the principal characters resigned to the apartments they live in, with the established plot conflicts not developing in a rich enough fashion. Dương nervily later attempts to make Tam more unsympathetic: after she is empowered by her growing ability to control her husband, the metaphysical powers granted by the spiritualist are also enacted upon her daughter, with her agency to grow and – more philosophically – her free will being denied.

Dương developed this thematic emphasis from short films she made prior to Don’t Cry, Butterfly, honing a focus, in her words, on “naggy middle-aged women”. Before the aforementioned magic realist and body-horror elements emerge in the finale, she can’t quite make the table setting as engaging at feature length. But then, as ceiling damp transmogrifies into a tentacled creature not far from Żuławski’s Possession, almost to punish Tam for her meddling with reality, and the film’s temporal timeline is turned upside down, we leave Don’t Cry, Butterfly more convinced, and suspecting that Dương has slyly frustrated us so the ending could deliver this outsized impact.

Don’t Cry, Butterfly is a production by Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, staged by Momo Film Co, FUSEE and Kalei Films. Its international sales are overseen by Barunson E&A.