Heaven and Earth by Hayslip and Stone

Oliver Stone has an undeserved reputation as a macho film maker, and perhaps even a misogynist or sexist one. "I'm just not that type of person," he says.*

A powerful confirmation of this can be found as early as Salvador (1986), his first major film. 

In that raw, fact-based drama there's a chilling sequence in which a right wing death squad attacks a bus full of nuns.

The murderous assault is shot from the women's point of view so that we, the audience, see the vile leering faces of these vicious thugs leering and drooling over us.

There is no question where Stone's sympathies lie.

And with Heaven and Earth (1993) he shot an entire movie from a female point of view, so to speak.

Again it's a true story, based on two autobiographical books by Le Ly Hayslip (played by Hiep Thi Le), a Vietnamese woman who married an American soldier and escaped to the USA.

("Escaped" is very much an apt term, considering Le Ly's harrowing odyssey...)

This is third and final part of Oliver Stone's Vietnam trilogy — begun with Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.

And in many ways it's his most ambitious. It's obviously deeply felt.

And in the early sections it seems to be shaping up to be Stone's masterpiece.

Le Ly is a happy child in the idyllic rural landscape with black water buffalo wading through glowing green rice paddies. It's a lush paradise that will never be the same after the war arrives.

Le Ly's straw hat is blown away by the wash of a helicopter in a sequence reminiscent of Platoon, where the copters blow the coverings off corpses waiting to be transported back to America...

The impossibility of Le Ly's position is hammered home when she is

arrested and tortured by the American-sponsored government because she's suspected of collaborating with the Vietcong.

And then she's abducted and assaulted by the Vietcong because they suspect her of cooperating with the government.

After further misfortunes, Le Ly ends up pregnant out of wedlock, picking through the trash of a US army base and finding the bodies of murdered prostitutes, discarded like garbage.

Then she is pressured into prostitution herself, as her baby boy screams at being abandoned.

The film is fearsomely potent up to the point of Le Ly's arrival in America married to Steve Butler (Tommy Lee Jones).

And initially the culture clash of Le Ly in her new home is forceful and funny — she watches a giant woman opening a giant refrigerator, and marvels... But soon thereafter, I feel, the movie goes seriously off the rails.

In sharp contrast to Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July, it's hard to know what we're supposed to care about — or even be interested in. 

Sequences that should be deeply moving — a shaman telling Le Ly her husband's spirit is in the house, her brother describing the terrible aftermath of the war, Le Ly's return to the shrine in the village — instead come across as dangerously close to Pythonesque.

In any case, the film was a financial failure. Or as Stone puts it: "the reception... brutal, and it didn't do anything at the box office... but I loved that movie."

(*The quotes by Stone are from this book, which I highly recommend. Image credits: All from IMDB.)