Dir: Truong Minh Quy | Drama 129′ 2024
Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam closed this year’s BFI London Film festival as much as Eight Postcards from Utopia opened it – 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 that fuses written and spoken poetry with sensitive visual imagery.
The spirit of slow cinema filmmakers such as Lav Diaz and Tsai Ming-liang is evident although these sequences are often edited into shorter segments creating a rich range of texture. The focus of Viet and Nam rests on two young Vietnamese men who express love for each other most deeply in the darkened spaces of coalmines 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 deciphered as intimate sources of lighting merge both bodies into each other. Poetry references include beaches as a graveyard 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 is referenced and the power of Frank Borzage evident with Viet and Nam another creative work inspired through souls made great by adversity. Although Vietnamese authorities have banned Viet and Nam for its negativity there is nothing negative about this film and its beautiful incandescent mapping of the spirit of redemption through the power of love. Peter Herbert
PREMIERED AT CANNES and the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | In UK cinemas early next year.