Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Joshua Trigg
Starring: Vanthiva Saysana, Itthiphone Sonepho, Pakornkham Boualek, Sonedala Sihavong, Athit Silavong, Anoulack Manichan, Lee Joy
The best part about being a grown adult is not being a kid anymore. It isn't just the open opportunities to purchase a martini (or, if you’re nasty, the means to make your own), wear suits and follow fashion over trends, or watch, say, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple on the big screen without ticket purchase chicanery (pro tip from someone who worked the usher shift: don't enter the screen or buy tickets in groups, kids). It's the sheer freedom that being a grown-up allows which is the stuff. You can basically do what you want. Most of the nights of my childhood were spent cocooned in bed bitterly fantasising about the excitements going on in the town streets around me: the dancing, the parties, the romance. The inchoate state of youth is a form of entrapment; entirely dependent upon adult others, completely limited by the boundaries of youth. And my childhood was one of blissful happiness, for children in sensitive or unstable environments the situation must be one of unimaginable horror.
Take Vanthiva Saysana's Bo, co-lead of writer/director Joshua Trigg's wondrous debut Satu: Year of the Rabbit. A keen photographer with a magpie's eye for detail and aspirations to be a photojournalist, the young teen is subject to the drunken, violent whims of her sot father following the death of her mum. Bo's tenacity and desire to escape is such that she commandeers an underbone, straps her camera around her neck and jettisons off into the Laotian countryside in search of a story to enter a competition with (that's another thing about being a kid: so many competitions).
Meanwhile, the titular Satu (Itthiphone Sonepho) is a small boy who has been abandoned by his mother at an orphanage which entails child labour, a situation given further difficulty by the discovery of unexploded mines in the grounds. The path of the stray crosses with the waif, and, along with a pet rabbit, they embark on a quest to relocate Satu's mother, who scant evidence suggests is somewhere in Vietnam.
The ensuing road trip has a Jocastion urgency: for Bo, uncovering the younger charge's mother is a sublimation, while for Satu this is an instinctive quest for maternal acceptance. While implicit, the psychodynamic applications of Satu: Year of the Rabbit's narrative act as a prompt. A visualist storyteller, Trigg prioritises the sumptuous spectacle of Laos over character study and the road trip becomes a gorgeous travelogue of the sweeping scenery, the people, the food (Trigg grew up in the Brecon Beacons, a beautiful massif area wherein people's relationship with nature is necessarily closer than that of us city slickers in metropolitan Caerphilly). Trigg sweetly dedicates the film to "My Love Mariana Garcia Carrizosa" (absolute alpha move: so lovely) but I think that the director's true ardour is reserved for the nation itself, such is the adoring gaze with which he captures it. Filmed in 16mm, the colours are a kaleidoscope of taupe, cornflower, umber as our intrepid heroes navigate Satu: Year of the Rabbit's picaresque: sandy grain in pillowed focus, the nostalgic warmth of the stock... you're helpless against it.
Which is just as well, because in terms of narrative jeopardy or propulsion Satu: Year of the Rabbit is not as munificent. There is a token motion towards a cat and mouse dynamic as grownups attempt to find the pair, and at one point the kids come up against machete yielding traffickers who, if you ask me, they manage to outsmart in a way that defies credibility. Yet, with this, perhaps the ideal audience for Satu: Year of the Rabbit, with its delicate themes of innocence, sincerely sweet nature and vivid imagery, is a younger one. Both leads are incredible, too, and as performers in their own right, without the perfunctory qualifier "child." As Bo and Satu amble towards a denouement which is perhaps unexpected, they discover the bittersweet truth that, for the young. freedom of movement means nothing if there is nowhere to go. Yet Satu: Year of the Rabbit is a lavish opportunity to while away at least an hour and half towards adulthood.
Satu: Year of the Rabbit is on UK/ROI VOD from January 26th.
