New Wave
Directed by Elizabeth Ai
Unrated
Runtime 1 hour 33 minutes
Opens in New York October 4, expansion to follow

by Christopher La Vigna, Staff Writer

Music as a universal language isn’t a novel concept. Its ability to transcend cultural barriers and physical borders had been observed and documented upon by countless voices, and yet, in her film New Wave, documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Ai manages to bring a refreshing take on this concept by narrowing the impact of music to a very specific genre: new wave (Eurodisco if you’re nasty) and its connection to a very specific community, first generation Vietnamese-Americans.

Elizabeth Ai’s family was one of the many that fled to America in the waning days of the Vietnam War. She was raised by her grandparents while her mother opened her own nail salons and worked hard to support the immediate and extended family, sending money back to those still in Vietnam and even paying to help them move to the states and set up their new lives. While this happened, Ai bonded with her rebellious Aunt Myra, who exposed her to the synth–and-reverb drenched glory of ‘80s new wave pop. The film recalls Phuc Tran’s engrossing memoir Sigh, Gone in that both work to convey the difficulties of the Vietnamese-American in late twentieth century America and how many saw music as their lifeline.

After quickly establishing Ai’s personal connection to the music, the film quickly pivots to focusing on a group of subjects: DJs, singers, record shop owners, producers and fans, all of them Vietnamese Americans who were plugged into new wave, specifically its Vietnamese subculture, in spite of being largely ignored by the mainstream. There’s a poignant, perhaps even cutting moment around the thirty-minute mark, a shot of an old CRT television displaying a news broadcast, giving us a sound bite that we’ve already heard earlier in the film: “...All those Vietnamese Refugees: can they become American?” But the last syllable in “American” is cut off as the image on the screen jumps to a shot from a music video, and the film dives into another slick and gorgeous montage of ‘80s new wave excellence, Vietnamese style. Who cares? the film seems to shoot back. Only the music matters.

One of the biggest singers to come from this scene was Lynda Trang Dai, a Vietnamese American who got her start covering hit songs from the big acts of the day, then gradually began to release her own music. Through a combination of present day interviews and a slew of archival performance footage, the film makes her talent and impact on the community overwhelmingly obvious. It also makes sure to point out that Lynda and other new wave singers of her day faced pressure and extra scrutiny from their elders for embracing sex appeal as a part of their image, something their white counterparts were more used to having roll off their backs, if only because they never felt the burden of having to represent their entire community.

The film expertly utilizes a strong blend of interviews, home video footage, and deftly crafted reenactments of the interviewee’s youth that manage to feel intimate and real, like a natural extension of everything else. Ian Nguyen, aka DJ BPM, has much of his story told through these flashbacks, and cinematographer Bryan Swanstrom manages to imbue the footage with the warmth and airiness of the distant memories that they are, even when Hguyen, like many of his contemporaries, recalls the strain that their youthful rebellion and naivete had on their relationships with their parents, who simply couldn’t understand.

Inevitably, the film does touch upon the harrowing shared experiences of the subject’s memories of fleeing their homeland in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, discussing their memories of fighting to survive their flight from the country. Here, the film observes the sacrifices made by the very parents that ultimately couldn’t connect with their children as they went about living the new lives they fought so hard for them to have, attempting to extend some grace to them.

Elizabeth Ai’s film is a perfect example of another old adage: “the personal is political.” Thanks to the power of new wave music, her past is truly never past; it is a living thing that surrounds her, powering her as she moves into the future.