Daughter from Danang and Born on the Fourth of July

Daughter from Danang and Born on the fourth of July are difficult to compare because they were both such different types of films. Daughter from Danang was very simple in terms of film quality. There was no background music or special effects but the way they filmed the scene in the home of Heidi’s birth mother was very intense. It really captured all the tension in the house and the amount of pressure there was on Heidi. It showed the difference in family structure. In America they showed a very nuclear family and the filmmaker used wide zoomed out shots to show all the space they had. In Vietnam it was clearly a joint family and by using zoomed in shots and circling the camera and focusing especially on Heidi, it was evident that this was a much tighter fit. They actual portrayal of the Vietnamese people was less a result of the filmic qualities and more script based. The power of film was underutilized yet understandable because this was an educational documentary film.
It was through Heidi's eyes that the viewer was supposed to view the Vietnamese people, yet she was a terrible tour guide. The way she handled being in a foreign country made me angry. Everything about her, from her hair to her voice, was annoying. There was really no redeeming factor about her. She was immature. Since she was a mother herself, I expected her to have some level of personal responsibility yet upon her arrival, she was a mess. We were supposed to identify with her but I left the film angry rather than empathetic.
Since Born on the fourth of July was actually a movie, it was able to utilize more filmic methods to represent the Vietnamese identities. Through the focused shots, the viewer felt Vietnam, the place. As the viewer, you felt hot while watching beads of sweat roll down Tom Cruise’s face in Born on the fourth of July. You felt the action during the barrack scenes because of the crisp clarity of the gun shots. This movie was able to develop plot, and story unlike Daughter from Danang. This movie has become a sort of representative of the Vietnam War. More than the Vietnamese identity, this movie helps prove the universality of morals. When Cruise’s character Kovic accidentally shoots women and children, he is heartbroken even though they were in Vietnam to fight a war. The mood was different in Vietnam, everything was shot in sort of an orange haze.
It is difficult to compare the two pieces because they have different purposes but each director employed similar tools to really show the viewer the Vietnamese climate. The focused shots to show the heat, the emphasis on narrow spaces to show the lack of space, how difference in not language but in cultural can be extremely taxing, were all utilized in both films. Vietnamese identity was visible through providing the Vietnam experience of space.