A Fragile Flower

Billed as the first musical in Vietnamese cinema, 'A Fragile Flower' arrived in 2024 carrying a second claim: the first Vietnamese feature shot entirely in the United States. It belongs to Mai Thu Huyền, who directs it, produces it and keeps one of the leading parts, and its fourteen songs are sung by Nhật Hà, the film's screenwriter and a well-known singer back home, who turns up on screen too.

Thạch Thảo lost her parents early and lives with her cousin Ellie, who sings in clubs and pushes her onto the stage one night. Her voice catches the ear of Sơn, a music executive at a television network, who brings her into the offices and introduces her to his wife, Yvonne, the one who signs off on budgets. Out of that meeting comes something bigger: a musical film with Thạch Thảo as its star.

Fame turns up fast, and with it the men around her, among them a millionaire who wants her for himself, a young musician who never leaves her side and the director of the shoot. Sơn becomes her support, Yvonne starts to suspect there is more than work between them, and Thạch Thảo feels her own body failing to keep the pace. How much of that success is hers, and how much is decided for her by the people paying for it?

The cast is led by Maya as Thạch Thảo, with Quốc Cường as Sơn and Mai Thu Huyền as Yvonne, and around them Trizzie Phương Trinh, Anh Dũng, Baggio Saetti, Đức Tiến and Nhật Hà herself. Quyết Trần shot it, and the first screening came on 21 March 2024 at an AMC in Orange, California, to a full house. Weeks earlier it had taken six prizes, best picture among them, at the FLOW Film Festival in Hollywood, Florida.

Atlas Distribution opened it in more than sixty American cinemas on 29 March, and the festival circuit followed, with a stop in Goa and a Paris screening in June. Vietnam was another story: it reached cinemas there on 12 April and became one of the year's lowest-grossing releases, selling tickets by the hundred and leaving the screens within weeks. The Vietnamese press went hard at the script, while the handful of English-language reviews it gathered were a good deal kinder.

• Drama
• Romance
• Music