In Traps , her first feature film, director Pauline Chan's sex scenes are powerful, muscular, roaring. The tension in a marriage in the throes of breakdown is tellingly exposed by passionate, rough sex on the bathroom floor. Earlier, we see the wife rubbing lotion into her husband's broad back, in an encounter that shifts suddenly from sensuality to sexual fury. This not eroticism. This is desperation, set amid the steamy heat of the Vietnamese summer of 1950, and against the mounting hatred of the communist uprising against the French.
Traps works on many levels.
The web of relationships between a young Australian economist, his photographer wife, a plantation owner, his wayward daughter and a people headed towards bloody revolution are seductively evoked. Above all, the film is performance driven. The cast includes Jacqueline McKenzie and British actor Saskia Reeves, who is impressive as Louise, a pliant wife who, in a defining moment, sets herself free. The making of Traps became a personal odyssey for Chan, who was born in Vietnam and whose psyche is imprinted with images from the Vietnam War. I grew up in Saigon.