‘Việt and Nam’ Review: Trương Minh Quý’s Haunting and Melancholic Look at a Country Struggling with its Past | TIFF

Life can be a series of question marks that are never resolved. We may forever wrestle with the possibilities and scenarios, but we are never sure. Such is the premise of Trương Minh Quý’s quietly touching and meditative feature Việt and Nam, selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard. Banned in its home country, Vietnam, due to its homosexual and downbeat themes, the film is likely to have a healthy festival circuit run, although its slow-paced narrative may test viewers’ patience.

Perhaps what makes this film stand out from similar works is Trương Minh Quý’s strong knack for mixing what’s imagined and what’s real, to create a wholly original picture that wonderfully conveys a sense of limbo: between what’s desired and what’s merely available at hand, the repressed aspirations and the harsh realities that make them impossible to achieve. By using dreams and visions as a framing device, Quy’s confident direction and contemplative screenplay manage to bring home the notion that when life becomes so agonizingly uncertain and harshly vague, we merely have our imagination to help us process what we simply can’t move on from. 

It’s a perfect way to describe a nation still grappling with the shattering aftermath of war. In Vietnam, millions of soldiers never returned home, their bodies never recovered and their tombs empty with nothing but mere stones carrying the names of ghosts who never returned. In some cases, dead bodies would be carried in plastic bags and moved across the Cambodian border so they can be properly buried back home, but such is a luxury only afforded to very few. This has resulted in endless pain, carried from one generation to the next, and while some have simply surrendered to the fact that they may never find out exactly what happened to their fathers and grandfathers, others remain hopeful that one day, their beloved missing ones will return alive or dead. 

In such a dire atmosphere where loss, poverty and pain prevail, is there any future that the country’s youth can look forward to? In one of the country’s largest coal mines, the film focuses on its two leads, Việt and Nam, who spend most of their day in the darkness. They are secretly in love, and while the mine is suffocatingly confined, it offers them the only venue for liberation – their sexual encounters limited to that underground space that is perhaps much more forgiving than the world that lies above. Both men have lost their fathers to war, but while Nam (Đào Duy Bảo Định) has moved on, Việt (Phạm Thanh Hải) and his mother are tormented by visions and dreams of the man who abruptly exited their lives and never returned. 

Those visions are sometimes hauntingly narrated through striking vague visuals matching the fuzziness of the subconscious, and in other sequences are narrated with sparse yet potent dialogue. Those sequences do not just serve as an artistic gateway to the film’s themes, they are the core drivers to the narrative as they direct the characters to go on search quests, looking for the body of Việt’s father. In one particularly haunting sequence, Viet follows a frog across the jungle on the Vietnam-Cambodia border, almost certain that it would lead him to his missing father’s corpse. The frog stops at an underground rocky cave, with its eerily pitch-black entrance challenging Viet to either enter or simply stay away. As he approaches, a shot penetrates his body, as he is convinced his missing father’s spirit is trying to have him relive his final moments on the battlefield. He lies on the wet ground, trying to absorb what he thought he just saw, in an attempt to reconcile with the fact that he may never truly know what happened. The sounds of the jungle sooth him, as his sense of loneliness feels for once less tormenting. 

While struggling with the past, Việt and Nam’s romantic relationship serves as a metaphor for the present. The narrative shifts back and forth between the lookout for Viet’s father and his developing relationship with Nam as we see the agony caused by past traumas merging with the present strain of existing in a country that is not capable of progressing. They decide to flee, looking for a better opportunity elsewhere – but they’ll have to illegally immigrate by hiding in a cargo container and embark on a perilous journey by sea which, just like their fathers who left for war, may very well be their last. But they have no choice as their country still reeks of death years later and the future is bleak. Perhaps their only way out is to look elsewhere, but that too, just like the entirety of their lives, is a huge question mark. 

Grade: B

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Strand Releasing will release Việt and Nam in the U.S.