The Cost of Mobility: Prostitution with HIV/AIDS and Crisis of Morality in Vietnamese Contemporary Cinema

• In Event: 190. Mobility and Everyday Moralities in Contemporary Vietnam

Abstract

This paper explores the representations of female prostitutes in Vietnamese cinema in the context of the country’s embrace of globalization, modernization and industrialization. The paper traces the continuities and changes over time in Vietnamese filmmakers’ and writers’ treatment of prostitution as a means to question moral values. The paper examines the impacts of the transition from a socialist economy to a capitalist economy on Vietnamese culture and society in the late 1980s and 1990s. It compares the depiction of prostitution in Le Hoang’s box-office hit Bargirls (2003) with Nguyen Thanh Van’s limited-exhibition The Little Heart (2006). It analyzes how these filmmakers paired the theme of prostitution with HIV/AIDS to present the anxiety about crisis of moral values which cause naïve women to become prostitutes and how this theme is used as a metaphor for depicting the nation’s dilemma of its desire for economic changes in its post–Reformation transformation. The paper argues that while these filmmakers use prostitution and its consequence, HIV/AIDs to represent their sympathies for poor women and anxiety about the crisis of moral values, it establishes a new idea of patriarchy to control women’s mobilization. This argument challenges the common view that Vietnamese films about prostitution were either a bold take on social issues or a “cheap trick” to attract audiences. The paper suggests that Vietnamese artists traditionally have intentions in using fragile female bodies of prostitutes as an effective way to express their anxieties about the erosion of morality in midst of social and historical upheavals.

Author

• Qui-Ha Hoang Nguyen, University of Southern California