Debut: ‘Thức Và Sẵn Sàng (Stay Awake, Be Ready)’ is an Understated Gem
Written and directed by Pham Thien An (The Mute, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell), Hãy Tỉnh Thức Và Sẵn Sàng (Stay Awake, Be Ready) is an understated yet powerful commentary on the place of individuals in their world and community. In 2019, Hãy Tỉnh Thức Và Sẵn Sàng received the Illy Award at its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival, Best International Short at Spain’s Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid Festival, and the Best Director Award at the Festival Curta Cinema Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival. Since 2019, the film has gone on to receive more awards at various festivals, most recently the Best Cinematography Award at Australia’s International Shorts Festival in 2021.
The 14-minute film unfolds in only one extended shot, which begins on a crowded street corner in Vietnam. Dialogue doesn’t begin until a minute into the film, when a man slightly out of frame begins talking with his two friends over a meal. “Humans are always proud of being the most intelligent creature,” he says. “They eat big, they talk big; all they’re doing is showing how superficial they are in both mind and soul.”
Catching them off guard, a motorbike crashes out of frame. The scene becomes more dynamic, with people scurrying to see what has happened, but within a minute the street has returned to its normal activity of a desperate beer sales representative traversing the streets trying to promote her product and the equally normal young boy practicing his fire breathing.
The banality with which the film treats the accident feels startling – after what sounds like a violent crash, viewers may expect the vendors and customers to attend to the cyclist with panic and urgency. But as the camera slowly pans to the group of men sitting at a table of half-eaten chicken, lighting their cigarettes on butane burners, viewers quickly acclimate to their disposition. The man’s initial musings, that people think themselves to be more important than they are, sit heavily in the tableau. With the camera remaining mostly static, viewers see scenes of the street continuing to the tune of Ave Maria in the man’s headphones, a commonplace scene made surreal and dreamlike by the knowledge of a bloody crash just out of view. While the friends discuss the scene of the crash, they casually mention that the cyclist’s brains have spilled onto the road. “Disgusting,” one man remarks.
Thien An positions the men in the lower right corner of the frame, allowing most of the shot to be occupied by the foreground. Ironically, the men criticize bystanders for only taking photos, while they continue to smoke. Despite the viewers’ and characters’ shared knowledge of a dead motorist just out of sight, the framing emphasizes that these men are not the only people, nor even the most important, in the scene. Though they are the only characters with audible dialogue, and theirs the only dialogue for which subtitles are provided, it is clear that every person in the scene is of equal importance. Far from emphasizing the arc of one character, even the cyclist, Thien An takes care to ensure that every person in the film is understood to be equal. With people of every age and gender, some clean-cut in suits and others sporting tee shirts and tattoos, some sitting comfortably and others hurried, the film provides a thorough overview of the various strata of society. Though presenting a fire-breathing child, the supposition of a mangled motorcyclist, and a dozen regular civilians, Thien An’s framing and dialogue centers each of them equally.
“Stay awake, be ready,” the man says, “for you never know the day . . . wherein the Son of man comes.” Despite the offhand nature of his statements, the man’s monologue is hard-hitting in the context of the film’s diegesis. Equal parts social commentary and voyeurism, Stay Awake, Be Ready paces its cogent dialogue and gritty violence (in addition to the crash, a man later cuts himself on broken glass and can be seen dabbing it with a dirty tissue in a puddle of spilled beer) such that the viewer is forced to absorb the events as though they are happening in real time.
Thien An says in an artist statement accompanying the film,
“Street pubs & stalls are places where people in Vietnam can chat [about] many things without fear of being judged. Through the conversation of three young men before the street stalls on a street corner, [and] a traffic accident [happening] suddenly nearby, the director wanted to sketch a multi-color picture of . . . humanity.”
The director succeeds in this. Though the film has a slow pace, it never feels drawn out. By the time the viewer has had a chance to acclimate to the apathy of the film’s characters about each new occurrence, another seemingly extraordinary event takes place. When the film ends, its final shot of a rain-soaked table of unfinished food serves as a backdrop for processing its events.
“When society makes people rush day by day, they often think of themselves as the center of the universe and actually forget how small people really are in the big world.”
In the span of 14 minutes, the audience will have experienced a range of emotions from shock to confusion to understanding. From the jolt of a fatal crash and a bloodied foot to the triviality of a beer saleswoman, no single event feels more critical than the next, ensuring no characters take the spotlight either. In a single shot, Thien Am captures multiple facets of many different kinds of daily life, weaving them together in such a way that by the end of Stay Awake, Be Ready, he has emphasized the message of the film’s title.