Forty-five years after the events experienced between leaving Vietnam and arriving in Canada, Ru, a story of resilience by Kim Thúy, comes to life thanks to the combined talents of screenwriter Jacques Davidts and director Charles-Olivier Michaud who have preserved it essence and poetry.
While his little brothers Quôc (Olivier Dinh) and Duc (Xavier Nguyen) have quickly integrated the North American way of life, Tinh (Chloé Djandji, touching), a shy 10-year-old Vietnamese girl, has difficulty adapting to her land home, buried under the snow, which she discovers thanks to her new friend, an adorable chatterbox named Johanne (Mali Corbeil-Gauvreau, hilarious).
Warmly welcomed in Granby by the latter’s parents, Lisette (Karine Vanasse) and Normand Girard (Patrice Robitaille), Tinh’s mother and father, Nguyen (Chantal Thuy) and Minh (Jean Bui), are forced to occupy jobs for which they are overqualified.
It took Kim Thúy around thirty years before he was able to write down his youthful memories. It was also thanks to her friend Karine Vanasse, who gave her a “nice notebook” upon returning from a trip to Thailand, that the lawyer turned restaurateur found a new vocation.
“I put words, scraps, starting with the last page, without knowing that it was the beginning of Ru, the starting point of a great adventure,” she confides in the new edition deluxe edition of the book originally published in 2009 by Libre Expression.
A delicate introspective story broken down into fragments, Ru took the reader from Saigon to Granby via Malaysia, following in the footsteps of a wealthy family fleeing their war-ravaged country in the hope of finding better living conditions in Canada . In order to do justice to this story of resilience told, 30 years later, by Tinh, the novelist’s alter ego, it was necessary to find a fair balance between beauty and horror.
Jacques Davidts (co-writer of Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve) and Charles-Olivier Michaud (Snow and Ashes) accomplished this mission without betraying the essence of the novel. We must also salute the contribution of two faithful collaborators of the filmmaker, the director of photography Jean-François Lord, who magnifies the Quebec winter, and the composer Michel Corriveau, whose soundtrack soothes like a lullaby (ru means “lullaby” in Vietnamese ).
Respecting the structure of the novel, Ru perfectly follows the twists and turns of the thoughts of the narrator traumatized by the war, by the perilous flight from Vietnam on a makeshift boat and by the unsanitary living conditions of the refugee camp in Malaysia.
Favoring close-ups of the face of his mute heroine staring at the camera, the director also creates moving long shots, where each actor plays his part with naturalness, notably during the trip to the sugar shack of the benevolent grandfather by Johanne (Richard Fréchette). The heavy silence of the Girards observing the courage and dignity of their hosts powerfully demonstrates that, like anyone who has not experienced war and exile, the former will never measure the extent of the danger incurred by the latter . Nor even the sacrifices they make for the future of their children.
The prize for the most moving sequence, however, goes to the series of shots of the characters who crossed paths with Tinh standing straight in front of the camera. Crystallizing the memories of the resilient adopted Quebecer, this gallery of portraits evoking an old photo album announces in the most beautiful way possible the birth of a literary vocation.
