22/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: Trương Minh Quý’s first fiction feature is a queer romance between two young coal miners, one of whom yearns to leave Vietnam

Critics love to point out obvious dualities in their reviews, yet those of this film can’t be avoided. Việt (Phạm Thanh Hải) and Nam (Đào Duy Bảo Định) are the secretive, star-crossed male lovers in Viet and Nam [+see also:
trailer
film profile], also equating to a binary: they each represent the key symbolic halves composing the country, which also threaten to pull apart (and of course, we can’t discount the historical resonance of its previously opposed north and south territories). Trương Minh Quý’s film, following up on his Locarno-premiered doc The Tree House [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], was one of the most impressive in this year’s Un Certain Regard at Cannes. If it’s successful thereafter, might Eng and Land be in the offing?

The movie is patient and increasingly hypnotic, and Trương overlays the story of a forbidden romance with a past-facing narrative thread involving the slain father of one of the men, a Viet Cong militant during the war. Whilst likely to garner knee-jerk comparisons to last year’s fine Camera d’Or winner Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], this film satisfies far more as what you could call a traditional “Vietnam” movie – namely, a retrospective look at the Cold War proxy conflict, chiming with past cinematic depictions’ fixations on both sides’ human casualties.

Nam has longtime roots in the country’s industrial north, but is getting itchy feet and wants to emigrate illegally; Việt has only recently done so to Vietnam itself, vividly recounted in dialogue and flashbacks, as he was placed in a flexible plastic container on the back of a trafficker who swam across the river border. Homosexuality is condemned and must be kept secret in the country, but the young men eye another amidst their dangerous work as coal-mine labourers; the soot-blown tunnels, they discover, are quite an atmospheric and snug place to make love.

But Nam can’t up sticks so soon: his mother, Hoa (Thị Nga Nguyễn), is engaged in the final stages of a ritualised grieving process, fully supported by the Marxist-Leninist government, whereby she’ll attempt to collect the remains of her partner, who conceived Nam with her and died in combat before he was born. It’s an oddly spiritually inflected take on traditional family values: Hoa speaks of visions of him in her dreams, and the remaining family members (including Nam’s uncle, who fought alongside him as a comrade) are ferried around the old battlefields by a fabulously attired fraud of a spiritual medium, a companion to apparently unearth the remains and offer him a proper burial. As the yellow-star and red flag flaps in Trương’s ominous establishing wide shots, our sense of a country struggling to reconcile abundant eccentric and non-conformist energies registers completely.

And domestic Vietnamese audiences might not get to see it: the country announced the banning of the film a few weeks prior to Cannes, stating that it gave a false and pessimistic depiction of the nation (the ban was not for its graphic sexual content, at least so they say). Viet and Nam occasionally feels like a boilerplate East Asian festival film, with its stately pacing and shot lengths, its recessive performances, and the requisite dive into troubled national history and folklore. Yet as we realise the canny, achronological manner in which Trương structures his film, and the empathy and tenderness directed towards his troubled young lovers, it gradually gets under our skin and burrows into the bloodstream.

Viet and Nam is a co-production by Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and the USA, staged by Lagi, Epicmedia Productions, E&W Films, Deuxième Ligne Films, An Original Picture, Volos Films Italia and Cinema Inutile. Its international sales are courtesy of Pyramide Films.