Cinema Francaise

Last night, I had this incredible craving for chinese dumplings after reading about a place in Vientiane called "Liang Niang" from Brett Dakin's book. I managed to find the restaurant, after talking in mandarin with a few chinese shop owners in town. The restaurant seemed remodeled, no longer the small shack described in the book.

The shrimp and chives dumplings and seaweed salad was excellent - as the owners are immigrants from a town north of Beijing. Most of the customers were other Chinese immigrants in town and all seemed to order up a good amount of food and ate fast. The young man who managed the place (perhaps the son of the owners), was pleasant and I was relieved to be able to clear up some order issues with him in his native tongue.

Afterwards, I made my way to La Centre pour La Language Francaise near the French Embassy. Brett's book had mentioned that they showed movies on thursday nights. I found my way to the screening room after getting directions in my really rusty French (full of inaccurate verb conjugations but the Lao staff was merciful). The movie was "Peut-Etre". I only caught the last half but the story is something like this: a young couple goes to a Y2K party in Paris. They are thinking of having a baby but the man writes off the idea as impossible. For some reason (that I missed due to being late), some kind of time/space drug induced portal in the apartment?, he ends up in the future, in a sand filled version of Paris and meets his son, daughter and their family. They all beg him to make children with his wife. He refuses and the 2 realities collide. The film was really enjoyable and included a performance by the aging Jean Paul Belmundo, hardly recognizable in the film from his Godard days.

Afterwards, I chatted with the projectionist, an soft spoken old Lao man who was once a movie star some 20 years ago, who acted in old Pathet Lao (resistence fighter) propaganda films. While this man was forgotten by Lao society today, the French employed him in their cinema, in a small way perhaps honoring his legacy. The French, for all their mistreatment of people in the region does play a small part in sustaining cultural activities today in their former colonies. When I was living in Hanoi, the French Cultural Center had put on an amazing music festival, in one venue combining various stages where traditional classical Vietnamese music, folk as well as live experimental local electronic acts performed.