Synopsis
It’s 2004 in Paris, and Guillaume Fontanel, 34, seems to party all the time without actually working, except as a part-time “professional blogger.” His mother, Beatrice Fontanel (nee Gaillard), a former war correspondent for Paris Match, comes from old money, with which she operates a refugee rescue program for the Hmong people in Laos and Thailand. The last time Guillaume, at age 6, saw his father, Romain Fontanel, he was lying in an open coffin after blowing his brains out under the Arc de Triomphe, his blood splattering on the Tombe du soldat inconnu (Tomb of the Unknown Soldier).
On the night of the 50th anniversary of the French defeat by the Viet Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu ending the French Indochina War, while Guillaume is staggering home from a night filled with booze, cocaine, and random back-alley sex, he stumbles across a “Hmong Lives Matter” demonstration demanding justice for the Hmong soldiers who fought alongside the French army. He’s not really interested until the speaker holds up a photo of his father, accuses him of genocide against the Hmong, and compares him to Hitler for hatching the plot to use the gentle, native Hmong as mercenaries when he was a Special Ops paratrooper in Laos.
The next morning, hungover, he stops dead in his tracks when he walks by Beatrice’s Skype video call with Florence, the young French-Hmong woman who manages the headquarters of Beatrice’s Romain Fontanel Foundation for Hmong Awareness in Bangkok. He tells his mother that the demonstration the night before affected him so deeply that he needs to go to Southeast Asia where his father’s story unfolded.
Thus starts Guillaume’s surreal journey of death, attack, unrequited love, hallucinogenic altered realities, a young Hmong girl’s resurrection, and betrayal – all orchestrated by a coalition consisting of Pierre, Loa Army General Saveng, and Sgt. Pao, the tribe’s shaman and headsman who served with Romain years ago, and who gives Guillaume two precious photos from his father.
In one last truly altruistic act – maybe the only one in his life – Guillaume Fontanel completes his journey from the cafes of Paris to the jungles of Laos where he confronts an entire civilization that his father turned into living ghosts and achieves final redemption.