We associate the New Wave music movement with synthy, punkish pop with big hair, catchy beats, dark clothes, and even gloomier worldviews. Ian Curtis of Joy Division (RIP) and Robert Smith of The Cure (still going) come to mind as poster children of a generation of musicians who carved their own subculture out of post-Vietnam War dissolution in America. But rarely do we in the West associate that politically charged soundscape with the Vietnamese-Americans — first and second generation and refugees among them — in even more of an identity freefall, dancing to their own self-made beats, and often ones recognizable to fans of the more familiar sounds to emerge from the New Wave.
Elizabeth Ai’s piercing and personal documentary “New Wave,” which the filmmaker is self-distributing this fall, digs into the untold story of the chaos, the glitter and the glamour, happening among Vietnamese-Americans in Orange County at the end of the ’70s and into the ’80s. What begins as a panoramic portrait of music wrought from the Vietnamese diaspora emerges as a more personal journey: Ai reconnects with her estranged mother, who she’s long blamed for leaving her in the care of her grandmother, but for reasons Ai did not fathom until making this film.
“New Wave” doubles as a greatest hits of the best music to emerge from the Vietnamese-American diaspora entertainment scene in Southern California — stage-burner Lynda Trang Đài and iconic DJ Ian Nguyen among them. But it’s also a necessary, microcosmic look at the effects of trauma and the legacy of the Vietnam War on U.S. soil for those whose parents came of age in their home country as the war began in the mid-1950s.
There’s also a shattering of the myth that, somehow, New Wave musicians and dancers on the stage or on TV, as in the diaspora variety show “Paris by Night,” were rolling in cash. Not so, as they often had to take care of their own multigenerational families at home. In the case of Lynda, dubbed in her day as the “Vietnamese Madonna” (and often covering Madonna’s songs in her own style, too), she’s a spiky and even prickly, at times, interview subject. It’s revealed that, while she still rides on her legacy forged in ’80s Orange Country, she now operates two Lynda Sandwiches storefronts in Bakersfield and San Jose.
Ai’s film is a documentary love letter to her own community and how its own interpretation of dominantly Western pop culture shaped attitudes that remain defiant and were even groundbreaking then. In voiceover, Ai fondly recalls her own uncles and aunts sneaking out to clubs at night, partying all weekend, clashing with their elders and the more puritanical past generations stunned by the appropriation of sexier dress, style, and musical verve. A far cry from what they were used to in Vietnam.
As joyous as “New Wave’s” musical montages and soundtrack are, the film doesn’t shy from tragedy, not only from the ripple effects on refugees (often children brought to the U.S. alone without their families after the war) but what happened in the subcultural underground. DJ Ian movingly recalls a bender of a night where he watched one of his friends accidentally shoot himself. In terms of the film’s structure (with editing by Hee-Jae Park), this segues “New Wave” into its more melancholic final chapter as the door shuts on a grand era, and immigrants or their children are left in the rubble of America after a devastating war in their homeland.
Sifting through the synth beats and punk-goth aesthetic of the New Wave, Ai uncovers a personal connection to the material. She had a daughter in 2018, a daughter who’s become curious as to why her grandmother isn’t part of their lives. This sends Ai on a journey to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she reunites with her mother, Lan Tran, a first-generation Vietnamese-American. Lan Tran, too, is reticent about meeting up with her estranged child. “Just say your mom died,” she tells Ai to tell her daughter over the phone. “You don’t love me.”
“New Wave” is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War. “In absence, assumptions become our truth,” Ai ponders in voiceover as she wonders why it took so long to reconnect with her mom. Ai’s work going forward is about making sure she has a better relationship with her kid than her parents, born during the war, did. It took picking up a camera to bring her to that revelation, and that’s the power of filmmaking.
Grade: B
“New Wave” opens Friday, October 25 at the Laemmle Glendale in California.
