Bassley (Olegunleko Ezekiel Gbenga) is a Nigerian footballer who was signed by a Vietnamese team, so moved halfway across the world leaving his family far behind. Unfortunately, since he has been there, he has broken his lower left leg, and is unable to play, so he must find other means to fill up his days other than washing his hair or playing tiddlywinks football with bottle tops. This is what brings him to a house in Ho Chi Minh City where he sets up a living arrangement with four middle-aged to elderly local women. Although they do not converse, or not very much at any rate, they have reached a peaceful understanding as they go through the tasks of the day in a contentment they never realised they could enjoy...
Director Le Bao, who is from this part of the world in his film, found it creating a stir in his native land thanks to the amount of nudity it contained, as all the five main players appeared starkers for many of the long, static shots it was consisting of. Not wishing to be unkind, but the women at least were not the possessors of the sort of bodies that we were used to seeing unclad on the silver screen, and although male nudity was becoming more prevalent, the footballer character was unusual in the respect of seeing him full frontal nude was not commonplace either. Yet while there were a couple of scenes of him and one of the women copulating in the background, this was keener on presenting nudity in the manner a Lucien Freud painting would.
So with that out of the way, if you can manage to accept it, what was on offer here? For the most part, a deadpan run of scenes emphasising the rituals of life, from washing to sleeping to cooking (naked cooking, without so much as an apron? Inadvisable), all of which are by necessity repetitive but something we simply go along with without question. In fact, there was a celebration of the mundanity of these tasks here, not making the ways we entertain ourselves the point of existence, but the ways we get through our lives, sustaining and keeping us on an even keel. Not that the fivesome here do not have downtime, they are able to amuse themselves as we are witness to, it's just that they go through that with the duty of prisoners ordered out into the exercise yard, as their house is a sparse, gloomy location.
Although filmed in a slum, other directors may have highlighted the joie de vivre of the people who live there to reaffirm our sense of hope in human nature, but Le wasn't so interested in that, not on the surface, anyway. There was precisely one scene where anyone laughed, and it was a shot from below huddle where the quintet stood in a circle and roared with mirth, a set-up so mechanical that you began to ponder whether he was pulling the audience's legs. There were certainly parts of this that may make you chuckle, be that nude bicycle riding (and nude motorbike riding - in the same room) or Bassley confessing to his pet pig his sexual shame about his first stirrings of arousal, but in the main it was so inscrutable in its aims that by the time we have left the grim, if roomy, house behind and gone to sea, you may have lost the plot, if there was a plot to lose. Perhaps it was about the dependable aspects of life, and how they can enhance it without us even realising, or if we do realise it, we can start to worry what would happen if they were ever taken away. Or maybe it really was supposed to be funny?
