The Sympathizer (Max)

[g5000]

This 7-part "HBO Original" series is a fictional account which begins during the fall of Saigon.

A communist sympathizer acts as a double agent for the North as a Captain in the South Vietnamese secret police. He is tasked by the commies after the fall of the South to follow the secret police general to the United States and report on the general's activities.

The Captain is half-Vietnamese and half-French. His mother was Vietnamese. His father was a French priest.

His father is played by Robert Downey, Jr.

As a member of the South Vietnamese secret police, the Captain has a CIA handler.

The CIA handler is played by Robert Downey, Jr.

When he was a younger man, the Captain attended college in the United States and then returned to Vietnam.

His gay college professor is played by...Robert Downey, Jr.

The General opens a liquor store and starts making political connections to gain support for an anti-revolutionary force to invade and retake Vietnam. One of his political connections is a jingoistic US Congressman.

One guess who plays the Congressman.

Kee-rect! Robert Downey, Jr.

And finally, the Captain is embedded with a filmmaker who is making a Vietnam war movie called The Hamlet. The Captain's job is to get as many pro-commie lines into the movie as possible.

You're not going to believe who plays the filmmaker.

Robert Effin' Downey the effin' Junior.

Was there an actors' strike or something?!?

The scenes of the Captain getting real Vietnamese people into the movie only to have them refuse to say commie lines are priceless.

The Captain pines to return to his homeland, expecting to be treated like a hero. I won't spoil what happens when he finally does disobey his orders to remain in place and returns home.

In each of his roles, Robert Downey, Jr. plays the stereotypes of his characters all the way to the hilt. Maybe the idea is to offset all the insulting stereotyping the Captain is subjected to throughout the series.

The actor who plays the Captain is amazing. I've never seen him before, but the nuances he had to portray as a double agent traitor commie bitch are a wonder to behold. Especially since his character is a lot smarter than everyone around him, good and bad.

The last episode gets really fricking weird. Totally surreal. Interesting choice.

 

[Zavulon]

This 7-part "HBO Original" series is a fictional account which begins during the fall of Saigon.

A communist sympathizer acts as a double agent for the North as a Captain in the South Vietnamese secret police. He is tasked by the commies after the fall of the South to follow the secret police general to the United States and report on the general's activities.

The Captain is half-Vietnamese and half-French. His mother was Vietnamese. His father was a French priest.

His father is played by Robert Downey, Jr.

As a member of the South Vietnamese secret police, the Captain has a CIA handler.

The CIA handler is played by Robert Downey, Jr.

When he was a younger man, the Captain attended college in the United States and then returned to Vietnam.

His gay college professor is played by...Robert Downey, Jr.

The General opens a liquor store and starts making political connections to gain support for an anti-revolutionary force to invade and retake Vietnam. One of his political connections is a jingoistic US Congressman.

One guess who plays the Congressman.

Kee-rect! Robert Downey, Jr.

And finally, the Captain is embedded with a filmmaker who is making a Vietnam war movie called The Hamlet. The Captain's job is to get as many pro-commie lines into the movie as possible.

You're not going to believe who plays the filmmaker.

Robert Effin' Downey the effin' Junior.

Was there an actors' strike or something?!?

The scenes of the Captain getting real Vietnamese people into the movie only to have them refuse to say commie lines are priceless.

The Captain pines to return to his homeland, expecting to be treated like a hero. I won't spoil what happens when he finally does disobey his orders to remain in place and returns home.

In each of his roles, Robert Downey, Jr. plays the stereotypes of his characters all the way to the hilt. Maybe the idea is to offset all the insulting stereotyping the Captain is subjected to throughout the series.

The actor who plays the Captain is amazing. I've never seen him before, but the nuances he had to portray as a double agent traitor commie bitch are a wonder to behold. Especially since his character is a lot smarter than everyone around him, good and bad.

The last episode gets really fricking weird. Totally surreal. Interesting choice.

Thank you. I'll watch it. Seems like really surreal for say, Vietnamese officer giving his military salute while not wearing his headgear.

 

[Zavulon]

As for me, it's a pretty nice piece of work. Self-ironical and self-quoting, rewriting and rethinking from the very begging to the open final. In some ways it looks similar to Guy Ritchie's "The Gentlemen" - a story inside story, told to a quite sceptical and critical thinking listener. The story about complicated schemes, lie and treason. It's catchy and it worth the time (seven hours plus coffee and cigarette breaks) to watch it and, may be, rewatch it later. So, I'm going to express my first impression about the first season.

From the very beginning the storyteller, the nameless Captain ("What is he? Chinese? Japanese? Pekingese? Get on your fucking knees? Dirty dragon filth", oh, it's an Australian of Vietnamese origin!) tell us a simple, but quite funny story about adventures of a commie spy in the America of 70-s, wrapped in his confession in a Vietnamese re-education camp (similar with the modern socialistic and hypocritical America). The storyteller tell us that they is speaking truth, but makes clear that it's a lie. He wrote something between lines and suggest us to play the game of revealing the truth. "There is always something to confess". And this work is a masterpiece of self-criticism and self-irony. The "branched cranberry" which looks like typical incompetence in "The Stranger Things" or as intentional insult in "The Gentlemen" (Russian boy Aslan and Russian girl Misha, seriously?) in the Simpathizer looks like as "a good old-fashioned cock-off" in the constrained circumstances. "I know about Trotsky, I know about Lenin, I know about Chernyshevskiy, and, may be, I know about Gertzen, too, but I can't tell you because it's too suspicious to be that smart in such anti-intellectual places like secret police or a re-education camp (or modern America)" So, you never can be sure, is it an intentional joke or is it just a funny mistake when, say, a supposed Southerner use Vietnamese (Northern Vietnamese) word "máy bay" instead of Chinese "phi cơ", common in South, for "plane". I like dogwhistle (another nice racists connotation) jokes, and this work suggests to an attentive viewer a lot of puzzles to untangle them. Or one can simply follow the stream of the story, which won't make you bored.

It's total BS from Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese point of view but, yes, it's quite progressive for the Americans. Anyway, it's not a work about Vietnam. It's a work about America and Americans. And, may be, it's a work about Ukraine and Ukrainians. You know, after inevitable fall of Ukraine, thousands of militants of the "NATO's puppet regime" will flee into America. And some American political groups will use them against another American political groups. Very well, if you want to have Ukrainian hitmen on your streets - it's your choice.

D'ailleurs, revenons à nos moutons. Returning to the plot of the series, it's based on the story of a young and idealistic Northern guy, half-French bastard, who studied a bit of American culture and a bit of Russian (and Vietnamese) revolutionary ideology and served as a VC mole in the US-puppets southern vietnamese camp. Quite predictably he is constantly getting involved into complicated and confusing situations. You know, it's a civil war. Literally everyone has a cousin or friend on another side. The Captain, the storyteller and, in the same time, the main object of the story, do know something about Russian dialectic materialism, but, what causes his troubles, is definitely not trained in the dialectic immaterialism. Yes, ideology may be important, but one should never forgot about the spiritual side of the life. You see - the Southern-Eastern Asia is warm, green and pleasant land. Almost heaven on the Earth. It's rich and generous, and the people who live there they are nice, polite and highly civilised. They were forced to be nice, polite, lawful and tolerant to each other because it's the only way to survive with their population density. Most of them are pretty agricultural guys for thousands of years, and even hunter-gatheres are highly influenced by their agricultural neighbors. Russia is different. It's a vast, cold and really human-unfriendly space. In it's south-western regions (like Ukraine), which can be compared with the habitated regions of Canada, in good years, people can survive by farming. In the rest of Russia pure farmers do not survive. That's why the old culture of hunting and gathering is still alive and kicking in Russia. And the culture of hunters includes hunting folklore, first of all, the fairy tales about transformation. Yes, the transformation as adaptation is a quintessential part of life, and all human cultures have tales about transformation of getting adult or about mating. "You was a poor and ugly creature (usually linked with water, like a frog or turtle) but then a princess kissed you and you became a charming prince". Typical story, common almost everywhere in the world.

Another type of story is a volonturely transformation into a shape of a large predator (lion, leopard, bear, wolf or other) for the goal of hunting or warfighting (including spying, sabotage, stealing, kidnapping and so on). In Western Europe, where most of large predators were extincted centuries ago, the stories about werewolves (or other shapeshifters) have more scary-tale tone (you know - the old and almost forgotten evil from the dangerous depths of the pre-antient millenias)... Werewolves are something strange and menacing for westerlings.

In the best causes Western writers use that image to examine or describe the contradiction between animal's and human's natures. (As well as that pseudo-scientific freak in the series suggested Captain to write down "Occidental" and "Oriental" sides of his nature). In the South-Eastern Asia, where the folks became agricultural thousands years ago, they do not have even tales about people deliberately transforming themselves into large predators for hunting. Even Chinese werefoxes are basically foxes, who achieved the capability to transform in the human shape (and anyway it's more about mating than hunting).

Slavic folks are not afraid of werewolves (not only because they do not exist, but because its something well-known, if not as a real-life experience, but something common in tales and stories). And, in Russian folklore, in many tales, transforming into a wolf is something simple and democratical. Anyone can go into the woods, find an old stump, stick a knife in it, roll over it, and transform into a wolf. Roll back and you became a human again. Simple magic available for everyone. There is only one problem - while you are lurking and hunting as a wolf, anyone can get your knife, and then you'll be a wolf until the end of your life. Looks like the Captain don't know about this vulnerability, or may be, don't care about it, trying to achieve "nothing". As his friend and teacher said - "you are still thinking in English". That's the problem for a shapeshifter. "If you wish to be a wolf in the woods, it's not enough to act like a wolf. You must be a wolf". But when you are a wolf you should never forgot about your knife in the stump. And even after the year in the re-education camp the Captain didn't became a true shapeshifter.
"The endings are hard. Aren't they? ", but we don't need the ending. "What we need... is a sequel" (I mean the second season). May be, the story about Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia in 1978, or about Chinese invasion in Vietnam in 1979 ("the first Socialistic war" as some guys call it). What a pity, that they won't dare to make it those days. It is easy to tell how abusive, ignorant and racistic are Americans, but it's quite difficult, almost impossible (for many reasons) for them to tell a real, or at least realistic story about Soviet Russia, Communistic China or Pol Pot's Cambodia.