Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Written & Directed by Phạm Thiên Ân
Starring Lê Phong Vũ, Nguyễn Thịnh, and Nguyễn Thị Trúc Quỳnh
MPAA Rating: Unrated
Runtime: 2 hours and 59 minutes
In select theaters January 19

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

The Cannes Film Festival’s Caméra d'Or award goes to the festival’s best first feature. Vietnamese filmmaker Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell joined the ranks of Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise by taking home the prize at the 2023 festival. And yet where the award is meant to herald a new cinematic talent, those three examples listed are the best known of the bunch. And for every McQueen and Jarmusch, who went on to have cinematic landscape altering careers, there are a dozen Zeitlin’s whose debut was the pinnacle of their career. Which is all to say that while the prize sounds prestigious, this ain’t the Palme d’Or and your mileage may vary. Such is the case with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which is a film maddeningly trapped between transcendence and utter boredom.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: a 3-hour art film composed of long, unbroken shots where very little happens, is not for everyone. It should also be noted that just because you make a 3-hour art film composed of long, unbroken shots, that does not give the film gravitas. For this stunt to work, the filmmaker has to be locked in on the purpose of their film and that purpose needs to draw a throughline throughout the film’s extensive runtime. Think Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman which earns its 3+ hour runtime because every frame reinforces a woman’s slow unraveling. The point being that runtime has to be earned, and Phạm Thiên Ân’s debut does not earn its runtime.

The problem with Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is that there is maybe 30 minutes of actual content. Thiện’s (Lê Phong Vũ) sister-in-law dies in a motorcycle accident. He takes charge of his 5-year-old nephew Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh) and transports him back to his home village in search of his brother. There are a couple long conversations thrown in with people Thiện meets along the way, or childhood friends he reconnects with, but other than that it’s long shots of the Vietnamese countryside or Thiện going from point A to point B.

The most compelling thing about Phạm Thiên Ân’s directorial style is the way he teaches you his visual language. The first two hours of the film are relatively engaging (read: if this sort of thing is your jam, you can hang). The sequences are trancelike, akin to saying a word over and over again it starts to lose its meaning. As such, sometimes these long shots develop a new meaning. You start to notice things, like how every sequence has some diegetic sound playing in the background that is eventually revealed. How the long shots make the movie feel lived in, and the setting goes from being an exotic locale to something normalized. It helps a western audience step into Thiện’s shoes, and that’s movie magic.

The problem is that once Thiện drops off Đạo at a Catholic boarding school so he can continue the search for his brother solo, there is a whole hour of the movie left. In that hour Phạm Thiên Ân’s hard won trust evaporates before our eyes. The film becomes an aimless journey into the director’s most pretentious tendencies. While I’m sure the aimlessness of the filmmaking is symbolic, as Thiện’s quest to find his brother is ultimately fruitless, it doesn’t make for interesting cinema. It is clear that Thiện’s spiritual journey is also part of this search, but we never get any context for what that spiritual journey means. Thiện is a statue who keeps his feelings under lock and key, and while this works in the first two-thirds of the film when he has his nephew as a foil, and we see his guard slowly coming down, it goes right back up when Đạo is out of the picture. It’s the sort of thing people make fun of when they make fun of long, pretentious art films, and that’s a real shame.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a movie that already has a small audience. It’s not the type of movie you would recommend to someone in good conscience unless you had thoroughly vetted their taste. And yet this is a movie I’d hesitate to recommend even to people who cite Jeanne Dielman or The Tree of Life among their favorite films. An audience will only give you so much goodwill for one of these long, glacially-paced art films, and at a certain point the returns start to diminish if the filmmaking is not locked in. Phạm Thiên Ân may feel that the tedium is part of the story he is telling, but never thinks about the audience and their tolerance for this sort of thing. When the film abruptly ends with Thiện lying down in a shallow stream, it’s not transcendence we feel, but relief that it’s finally over.