Losing Childhood Innocence as We Drive On
A Review of My Father’s Truck (2013)
Written and directed by Mauricio Osaki, My Father’s Truck is a short film set in Vietnam that follows the story of a ten-year-old girl, Mai Vy. She has a hard time at school, as she does not have friends and is often bullied by the boys. One day, she decides to skip school and suggests to her father, who is a truck driver, that she serves as his assistant for a day. After slight hesitation, he agrees, and asks Vy to collect money with a can from the peasants whom he drives across various fields in the countryside. On this journey, Vy finds out that her father, whom she admires dearly, is not exactly the upright figure that she originally believed he to be, and that the world outside of classroom is not as wonderful as she thought it was, either.
In just the short 15 minutes running time, Osaki manages to tell a story with multiple layers in a beautifully heartbreaking and nuanced way. My Father’s Truck, first of all, is about father — daughter relationship. Just like any other average ten-year-old, Vy holds her father in a very high regard, as if he wereher superhero. She admires him for his job as a truck driver, and even asks him if he would teach her to drive someday. When Vy is at school, her expression is monotonous, often blank and a bit melancholy, but when she is with her father, her entire feature is animated — she smiles more often, and her eyes seem to shine. Vy’s father becomes very upset with her when she makes a mistake as his assistant on the truck, and we can clearly see how much this affects Vy through her expression and gestures. As the truck comes to a stop, Vy does not apologize to her father, but instead offers him a piece of cake. The father stops being mad at her, and tells her all he hopes for her is that she be serious in her work. Osaki depicts the strong familial bond in a very subtle way, which is in accordance with the traditional, conservative setting of the story, and still manages to touch his audience.
Secondly, this film is about the growth of Vy and how the reality of the world deprives her of her naïveté. Throughout the film, the audience is usually eye-leveled with Vy, looking directly into her eyes and viewing the world from her point of view, which makes it easy for the audience to empathize with what Vy is going through. After Vy finds out about her father’s real work besides being a truck driver, she walks away from him into the fields, and we see several shots of her and her reflection in the pond, moving together. The “doubleness” of Vy and her reflection suggests the contrast between Vy’s imagination of the real world outside of the classroom and the reality, and between innocent Vy and the Vy that is forever changed by the revelation. In the middle of the wide field, Vy holds on to a puppy gently with great care, just like she is trying to shield it from dangers. She has a somewhat childishly stubborn expression on her face, which generally appears when children demand their parents to let them keep a pet. The expression suddenly hit the audience with the fact that Vy is still a little child after all, and what she just witnesses might be very devastated for her. Her holding on to the puppy is her struggle of holding onto her childhood innocence.
My Father’s Truck is a simply story with complex layers that I believe any film lover would appreciate, but it would especially strike a chord with adults that feel like they have forgotten the innocence of childhood. Following Vy and her father’s road trip across the scenic Northern Vietnam countryside and witnessing Vy’s sudden realization of the dark side of the world, we could not help but wonder at which point on our own road trip something happened and made us not a child anymore. At the end of the film, we are left with the question: Vy hopes to go on the road and into the real world to escape from the school that is like a cage to her, but is the real world — our real world — really just a even bigger cage?
