‘The Sympathizer’ is designed to leave you believing nothing

The Vietnam War has had its share of screen time, but always from the point of view of the Americans, because — as their first major defeat — it remains a national trauma. An account from the Vietnamese point of view was missing until 2015 when The Sympathizer was published, winning the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. It has now been adapted into an HBO series directed by Decision to Leave’s Korean filmmaker, Park Chan-wook.

The novel was written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, an author and university professor whose family fled from Vietnam to the U.S. when he was four. Nguyen brought his own personal angle to bear on rootlessness, which also characterizes the story’s main character, a double agent who is a spy for the North’s communist regime who has infiltrated the South’s secret police and is then forced to take refuge in the U.S., where he lives with those who lost the war. The result is a spy thriller brimming with dark humor and surprising plot twists. Themes such as immigrant identity, prejudice, what it means to be loyal, and the myth of American cosmopolitanism, or the so-called melting pot, are all showered with a liberal dose of sarcasm.

It is a crazy story and the streaming series is as wild as the book. The Captain, as they call the narrator whose name is never provided, experiences all kinds of adventures in successive scenarios: Saigon before its fall; Los Angeles, including Hollywood, within the exiled Vietnamese community; and later his enrollment in a guerrilla gang consisting of crackpots planning a counterrevolution. The Captain is of mixed blood descent, the son of Vietnamese and French parents, but American-educated, which exacerbates his rootlessness. His whole life is a lie, but it is not clear which of his identities is the least genuine.

You can’t believe anything because The Captain, played by Hoa Xuande, narrates his story during a harsh interrogation that takes place in a mysterious future. He admits that he is not always telling the truth, that he makes up details of his own, and dwells on intimate matters that should be of no interest to his captors, who are also his bosses. So all this is metafiction, a fiction within fiction: the main plot is based on The Captain’s account, and when he puts it down on paper, the novelist in him comes to life. He claims to have been loyal to the Viet Cong but he also had links with the CIA and his contacts with Hanoi became confused and distant, and he integrated into Western life despite his sympathies with communism; meanwhile, his best friend was a compatriot eager to exact revenge on the war’s victors.

There are more bewildering elements. One of them is introduced by director Chan-wook when he asked the same actor, Robert Downey Jr, to play four characters, almost all of them non-Asian, who portray the different faces of power in the U.S.: he is a CIA agent, a professor of Oriental studies, a congressman and a filmmaker. All these roles carry an absurd and powerful undertone. Until you realize the gimmick, it’s easy to get confused.

There is a delightful yet rather pathetic portrait of Saigon in 1974, where people were trying to act as if everything was normal despite collapse being imminent. The community of exiled Vietnamese is also portrayed as pathetic, living as it does under the command of the General who refuses to assume that the war has been lost. Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh is convincing as Sofia, a Japanese-American who works for a professor whom she despises because, with its distant view of the East, his institution is also pathetic. And the film industry is pathetic, determined to tell its version of Vietnam — there seems to be a parody of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now — without paying the slightest attention to the actual Vietnamese, who are just extras; in fact, anyone with Asian features will do.

That you don’t root for anyone in The Sympathizer is the aim of both the book’s author and the series’ director. The series does not detract from the book. It is a surreal and rounded portrait of disbelief, of the absurdity of the causes we believe to be just. We needed a different and more cynical angle on the Vietnam conflict, which is so similar to other later and current conflicts, as well as its postwar fallout. The mockery does not pretend to lecture but rather to relativize, and that has to be good.

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