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Cuong is an admirable man. He has a successful career, a beautiful wife, and a good son. However, his life begins to turn upside down when he discovers Thang - a friend of his son is related to Trung, his gay lover in the past.

Cinematography is great; story is incomprehensible.

Nothing more than pretty pictures and A LOT of melodrama

I am not Vietnamese. If I were, perhaps I would understand this movie on a different level. But my observations are as a Westerner, as someone who has lived in Asia for decades and as someone who has been involved in filmmaking and screenwriting for a long time. The title is dramatic. Some of the images in this film are breathtaking, especially of the countryside. Some of the music is really superb. I am not sure if the music cues were purchased or whether someone actually wrote them specifically for this film. They sound like they belong in a film with a much bigger budget. The plot of this film is so convoluted that it was nearly impossible to understand or follow. There is a supporting character with the worst wig I have ever seen, which was sad, because he had a beautiful face. Also, even though he plays key roles in the film, I had absolutely no idea who he was or how he was connected to any of the main players. The director has a great eye for color and images. The cast, for the most part, is appealing, although only a few of them have actual acting talent. The problem is: the story can&#39;t decide if it&#39;s a tragic drama with a shocking twist, or a zany comedy, complete with 50s-style pop music, forced humor and over-the-top characters and situations. Because this film has a &quot;shocking&quot; reveal late in the story ( I thought it was laughable, not shocking), I will not reveal it. But... if you are looking for a story about gay Vietnam, or even LGBTQ Vietnam, you are not going to find it here. It is much more soap opera-ish, with any number of incomprehensible moments. One of my favorites was when the father tells the son that he (and his wife) will &quot;explain everything&quot; to the son... after he graduates -- right after a traumatic situation. I kept thinking, &quot;What are you waiting for? Why don&#39;t you tell him right now?&quot; This happened several times in the movie and I basically stared at the screen with my mouth open, &quot;Huh?&quot; There is obviously a great beauty to be seen in Vietnam. Some of the drone shots were breathtaking. Why it is that the director, who definitely has talent, decided to make this conflicted, confusing, ultimately unsatisfactory soap opera comedy melodrama is beyond me. Also, anyone choosing to view this film for male eye candy -- there are about 2-3 seconds of fleeting male nudity, so, you will be wasting your time. Some of the cast is extremely beautiful and they are very lovely to look at, and there is one young woman who plays comic relief, and she was great. But, and I regret saying this, this film does not live up to its fantastic title, even though the production worked hard to connect the first major plot point with the last one. Last, there is a really disturbing scene of one of young male leads pushing his supposedly pregnant fiancee so hard that she falls down. It was uncalled for and absolutely totally wrong. I don&#39;t know how anyone connected with this film could have approved of that moment. My three stars are only for great cinematography. The sound was good, too. But the story...? No. It did not work.

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Bridge of Destiny

I have no idea what I just watched, and I rewound several times because I thought I&#39;d missed something, but no, it&#39;s just an incomprehensible story. I thought maybe the subtitles were &quot;off,&quot; but no, they seemed to be right in the context of what the actors were saying. The film itself is mostly very pretty to look at, both the actors and the countryside of Vietnam. As near as I can tell, two men in 1999, fall in love. One is a field worker, and the other is a &quot;master&quot; of some kind -- maybe his family owns the fields the other works. Their love cannot be, of course, due to prejudice and all of the other usual reasons. The wayward master son finally agrees to marry a woman, and then we skip 20 years to 2019, where the story continues. That&#39;s really all I&#39;m sure I understood. SOMEONE becomes the antagonist of the field worker&#39;s now heteronormative family, and this someone seems to be connected, somehow, some way, to the original master son. As the other reviewer stated very well, this someone character is a major role in the film, and somehow knows everything from 20 years before. He is too young to be the original character, and also doesn&#39;t look like him, but then the original woman who the &quot;master&quot; son was going to marry refers to him as her husband, which also doesn&#39;t make sense because he is young enough to be her son, yet she is also the woman who was thrown down on a bridge (the titular Bridge of Destiny, I assume), and is implied to have miscarried her original child, so I came out of the film having NO idea who this character was. Oh, and in case you missed it, this woman has heart problems. Broken, I assume. Does this sound like a good time? Have at it then! I won&#39;t be watching this again, I know that. Find another film for the evening.

Excellent film, the acting in the important roles is very solid, the music that underlines the story is tastefully chosen, dominant, the set design and processing are at a high level, and I rank the film on the same level as another Vietnamese film gem - Goodbye Mother. At the beginning, we find ourselves in 1999, when two young men TRUNG (son of a brick factory owner) and CUONG fall in love and later something tragic happens. Twenty years later, CUONG is happily married (wife TRUC, boutique owner, adult son HAI). But someone from the past wants revenge, it is the woman HA (who once dated Trung before he met Cuong), through a young long-haired man named THANG. Will it destroy the whole family when it turns out that the husband, father and serious man CUONG is actually gay? Partly a romance and a light comedy, but otherwise, Bridge of Fate is a completely dense drama that hides one huge surprise for the viewer at the end, emotions will run high for many and hopefully no one will reveal it here... It is not primarily a film about eroticism and you need to watch it twice, but about how people are different and how they can accept the &quot;otherness&quot; of others. After all, the film also features the character of the (trans) bar owner Aunt TRAM, played by an actor who, with her boyfriend, is one of the biggest Vietnamese celebrities, as well as a gay man, a fat girl with glasses, and Aunt TRAM&#39;s niece, the girl VY, who beats up every guy and peeps at the beautiful HAI... and everyone is equal, no one is surprised, and that, along with the deep love between two human beings, is what I value most about the film. The story itself is probably not 100% feasible in practice (yet), but it was supposed to make us angry and shock us, it&#39;s not a flaw, on the contrary, we would then have to punish Lord of the Rings and other fictions in the evaluation for the story. For me, a completely surprising experience from Vietnam, where the Czech Republic is digging.

User reviews

Bridge of Destiny

Cinematography is great; story is incomprehensible.

Nothing more than pretty pictures and A LOT of melodrama

Excellent film ...

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