Dir: Truong Minh Quy | Drama 129′ 2024
Truong Minh Quy’s VIET AND NAM closed this year’s Bfi London Film festival as Eight Postcards from Utopia opened with bold challenging conceptual filmmaking. These are contemporary films confronting the sometimes-tortured psyche of respective nations with filmmakers looking for answers from past histories while opening up the possibilities of the future. Viet and Nam is a dark but strangely illuminating film reflecting in part on how the “American war “of 1955/1975 in Vietnam has repercussions decades later with a sense of history underlying the film’s fusion of both written /spoken poetry linked to sensitive visual imagery.
The spirit of slow cinema filmmakers such as Lav Diaz and Tsai Ming-liang is also evident although these sequences are edited into shorter segments creating a rich range of texture. The focus rests on two young Vietnamese men who express love for each other most deeply in the darkened spaces of coal mines where both are making a living through low paid work as a way to escape national poverty. At home they try to reconcile difficult relationships with fathers and families, discreetly avoiding drawing attention to the nature of a same sex relationship. With damaged lungs and Cocteau like line drawings burnt into cuts as tattoos, the two naked bodies of the lovers are sometimes barely perceived as intimate sources of lighting that appear to merge both bodies into one. Poetry references include descriptions of beaches as graveyards for the crushed crumbs of seashells. In the film’s final sequence, the two attempt to leave Vietnam in a shipping freight container on an ocean filled with as much beauty and danger as the cold forbidding earth from where they are escaping.
For Minh Quy, the sea becomes another forbidding and dangerous space with the two lovers locked in a floating freight container adrift. The surreal spirit of Jean Cocteau along with the power of Frank Borzage is evident and this is another creative work inspired by the idea of souls made great by adversity. Although Vietnamese authorities have banned Viet and Nam for “gay content” and negativity, there is nothing negative about this film and its beautiful incandescent mapping of redemption through the power of love.
PREMIERED AT CANNES and the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | In UK cinemas early next year.