3/5 stars
Viet and Nam, the third feature by Vietnamese filmmaker Minh Quy Truong (The Tree House, 2019), which had its premiere in the Cannes festival’s Un Certain Regard section, is an abstract, opaque drama.
Shot on 16mm film, which lends the film a lovely, worn-in feel, Viet and Nam begins with a close-up of two men talking tenderly. Viet (Duy Bao Dinh Dao) and Nam (Thanh Hai Pham) are coal miners, working 300 metres (1,000 feet) below ground in claustrophobic conditions.
It immediately becomes clear there is a sexual attraction between the two men, but talk turns to Nam’s plan: he wants to escape his bleak existence by arranging to have himself smuggled to the West. “You’re crazy,” comes the reply.
Throughout, information is drip fed to the viewer. At one point, as the miners descend below ground in a creaking lift, they discuss the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the scene takes place in 2001.
The mine shaft is deeper than the 100-metre foundations of the Twin Towers, they muse – barely registering the seismic nature of the terrorist attacks, perhaps because they face their own daily horrors deep underground.
Before Nam can make his bid for freedom, he takes a journey with his mother, who has been called out to in a dream. She claims Nam’s father, a North Vietnamese soldier, has told her to find his missing body.
So begins a journey into the jungle, one that sees the film veer off track, frustratingly, and into allegorical territory. Of course, with the characters named as they are, it is a nod to the devastation felt by the Vietnamese since the war.
In truth, Viet and Nam is a film of moments, rather than a cohesive whole. But it is a brave, symbolic and sometimes astonishing expression of a nation’s torment.