THANH HAI PHAM, DUY BAO DINH DAO IN VIET AND NAM

TRUONG MINH QUȲ: VIET AND NAM (2024) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Vietnamese gay miners in love make for a "drowsily distinctive" film

So Says Jessica Kiang in her Variety review from Cannes Un Certain Regard. This sensuous slow cinema of two coal miners Kiang thinks the filmmaker may not want us to watch (though "the body-contouring properties of coal dust on sweat-slicked skin [rarely] been more sensuously explored") so much as to "doze and dream our way in and out of it."

Certainly two gay miners who make sensuous love down in the mine is an eye-catching, titillating subject. They are Viet (Duy Bao Dinh Dao) and Nam (Thanh Hai Pham), two decidedly scrawny twenty-somethings, and they are poetically in love. But this Cannes Queer Palm nominee turns out to be a film that's panoramic as well as intimate, and tinged with both collective and personal tragedy. One of the two young men plans to be smuggled out, in some system of plastic bags, and this reference to human trafficking alludes to the 39 Vietnamese refugees found suffocated in an articulated refrigerator lorry in Grays, Essex, UK in 2019. A present-day reference to 9/11 actually sets the action twenty years earlier, to 2001. But talk leads back to the ghosts of Vietnam's past, particularly the American war, as Nam’s mother (Thi Nga Nguyen) leads the young men on a journey to find out where his soldier father, her husband, died and where his body is. And there is a memorable scene of a white-faced medium with a fraudulent air but a forceful manner who channels missing souls for those many still seeking to resolve war losses.

The young lovers and past memories seem moody with anticipated loss, and memories of the war as well as detonations in the coal mine give a pervasive sense of the violent tenor of life. Underground images sometimes are nearly black. But dp Son Doan's imagery shot on 16mm stock includes external scenes that offset the darkness with reminders of the distinctive aesthetics of the Vietnamese landscape. There are light moments too like the one when Viet's ma's elderly friend Ba (Viet Tung Le) asks when the two boys are getting married and one blurts out, "To each other?" - a misunderstanding the audience gets, but not Ba.

The search in the second half takes the trio to the forested Central Highlands from whence director Quy himself hails, where unexploded ordinance remains.

Past trauma and present dissatisfaction swirl around in this moody, poetic film that may leave you almost in a trance. There's a powerful feeling of sensuality and world-weariness that forms a picture of a country whose present is so unsatisfactory Viet may beg Nam to stay, but there can't be much conviction in any argument, and we can see why this film is banned in Vietnam for its "negative view" of the country. One can't exactly contest that.

A subtle, memorable film nonetheless whose stillness, magic, and personal landscapes suggest the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but also show the filmmaker himself to have arrived at a distinctive new maturity with this third film. (John Berra in ]Screen Daily[/I] found "discernible echoes" of Bi Gan and Anocha Suwichakornpong here as well.)

The film released in France last Wednesday, September 25, and the and the AlloCiné press rating is 3.4 (68%), only "moyen," but the hard-to-please Cahiers du Cinéma likes it, and the passage quoted from the Cahiers critic, Thierry Méranger, is as good a description of this film as you''re likely to find: "From start to finish, the film borrows from queer romance, working-class chronicle, socio-political pamphlet, psychoanalytical quest, historical fable and dreamlike essay, in a series of sequences that are mostly free of any obligation to chronological or stylistic continuity." True: and it all somehow works!

Viêt and Nam (Trong lòng đất,"Under the Earth"), 125 mins., debuted at Cannes May 22, 2024 in the Un Certain Regard section. It was also included at nearly a dozen other festivals including New York, where it was screened for this review. To be distributed in the US in early 2025 by Strand Releasing. Metacritic rating; 76%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.