The Captain is between two worlds as the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest in southern Vietnam, just before the fall of Saigon. Outwardly, he moves calmly through the offices of the army, which defends the country from communism, while his English office allows him to ingratiate himself with the American authorities.
However, unrest is his natural state: he works as a spy for his northern comrades and, when he does not have to look for a confidential document in a general’s office, he must fear in case his identity comes out during a violent interrogation. When he flees to America in the midst of the communist offensive, his duplicity is accentuated.
The South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook, known for Oldboy or The Handmaiden, dares with the novel The Sympathizer by Viet Than Nguyen with the help of Don McKellar. They make up a miniseries with a confusing tone, between satire, spy thriller, black comedy and warmongering, which are interspersed while Hoa Xuande plays a complex character with determination.
Since the Captain pretends among capitalists and must tread carefully with communist superiors, the actor can barely count on the lines of dialogue to address his character’s feelings and concerns, depending entirely on expressiveness.
The main attraction of The Sympathizer, which premieres on HBO Max on April 15, is to see a critical reading of the war conflict. As a brake, the participation of a Robert Downey Jr who has just won the Oscar for Oppenheimer. In the shoes of different secondary characters, his parodic and overacted approach is directly unbearable to watch due to the actor’s overconfidence and his absolute lack of grace.
