DVD Review: Stephane Gauger's SAIGON ELECTRIC, B-Boys In Vietnam

Editor, U.S. ; Dallas, Texas (@HatefulJosh)
DVD Review: Stephane Gauger's SAIGON ELECTRIC, B-Boys In Vietnam
If someone had approached me a year ago and said, "Hey Josh, we're going to throw a film at you that involves Vietnamese B-boys dancing to save a community center and you're going to love it!", I would probably have laughed in their face. Yet, here we are. Stephane Gauger's Saigon Electric is exactly the film I described above. A competitive hip hop dance crew marches its way through numerous local dance-offs and, ultimately, an official contest in order to earn the cash to save a community center from being demolished. It sounds hokey as hell, but Gauger's got a talent for imbuing even the most formulaic of ideas with real emotion and building a solid story that will have you cheering at your screen, even though you could've seen the end coming a mile away.

The last decade or so has seen a bizarre uptick in the number of competitive dance films on the market. I suppose the trend began with You Got Served, which was a surprise hit that launched a flood of imitators, most notably the Step-Up series, which has garnered its own cult following among film fans. While no one dances AT the camera in 3D in Saigon Electric, I still think it holds up pretty damned well against these major studio pictures with a miniscule fraction of the budget.

Truth be told, there's not a lot new in Saigon Electric when it comes to the plot, the real revelation in this case is the style and panache with which the film is put together. Gauger's last feature, The Owl & the Sparrow, was a quietly charming romance that came out of nowhere and won hearts at film festivals back in 2007/2008. With that film, Gauger showed an innate ability to capture emotion on camera with a bare minimum of dialogue, having taken great advantage of the hustle and bustle of Saigon in his story about budding love in the big city. In this case, he takes well worn tropes from several different genres of teen friendly films (the country bumpkin makes her way to the big city to be a star, the couple from opposite sides of the tracks, the aforementioned community center) and mashes them together into a film that is significantly more than the sum of its parts.

What truly sets this film apart from the bigger budget versions of this story is the pacing and attention paid to character building. The two lead characters, Mai (Van Trang) and Kim (Quynh Hoa), get lots of room to breathe and create their characters on screen. We see Mai's evolution from a wide-eyed hillbilly to a street savvy, but still optimistic dancing queen. We also see Kim's transition from the standoffish tomboy to romantic lead who overcomes her own fear of happiness to lose herself in love. Beyond that, there is plenty of characterization for the supporting characters as needed, but having strong central characters who compliment each other so well is a great strength of Saigon Electric.

However, the vast majority of the audience just wants to know how the dancing is. Well, it's pretty damned impressive to me! I'm no connoisseur, but I was very happy with what I got. Gauger's up close and personal style of shooting really did the dancing justice. He didn't shoot those scenes like action sequences, he shot them like art, and that makes all the difference. Gauger's camera gets up close and personal, turning the moves into poetic motion on screen. Perhaps not as hyperactive as some of the western stuff, but certainly more visually interesting. This really isn't the type of spectacle that something like Step Up or You Got Served is designed to be, it is more personal, even in it's cliched moments, and I admire that.

As I mentioned in my Asian Film Festival of Dallas preview from last year,
"I have no interest in B-Boys, but I am very interested in what Stephane Gauger does, and I think you should be, too."
Saigon Electric was better than I thought it would be, and proved that the right filmmaker can make any subject interesting to the open-minded viewer. Definitely worth checking out.

The Disc:

I'll admit a little bit of bias in this section. Saigon Electric is being self-released by the filmmakers, with a little push from the theatrical distributors, Wave Releasing. I'm a sucker for micro labels and DIY distribution, and that gives Saigon Electric a bit of a bump when it comes to cache with me.

The disc itself is very well put together. Saigon Electric looks great on DVD, the progressive image is bright and contrasty, and features about as much detail as one can expect from a DVD these days. Gauger's visual style is very well represented, and the sort of over-saturated, intense, vibrant look of the film on DVD matches well with what I recall having seen the film theatrically. The sound is a Dolby Digital stereo mix that represents the film well. As I mentioned above, the film isn't flashy aurally, but sounds really great here.

The filmmakers have loaded this disc with bonus material in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if it had been snapped up by a bigger label. We are treated to deleted scenes, a fifteen minute making of that includes interviews with all of the principal cast and crew, three music videos for songs featured in the film, and a very nice commentary track. The commentary features director Gauger, and producers Danny Do and Anderson Le, the three are very open and know what a commentary should sound like. There's no bullshit describing what's happening on screen, they have enough anecdotes to last the full feature, and give a very good feel for what it was like on the set of Saigon Electric.

Saigon Electric was officially launched on DVD last Saturday, and is officially available from their own website at a very reasonable price. I can definitely recommend this disc, it looks and sounds great, the film is great, and the money goes to the people who made it all happen, what more could you ask for?
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