LIEN BINH PHAT AND DO THI HAI YEN IN KY NAM INN

LEON LÊ: KY NAM INN (2025) NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL

A doomed romance in postwar Saigon

This is the romance - a Letterboxd contributor (and he's not the only one) calls it Vietnam's In the Mood for Love - of an intellectual young man, Khang (Lien Binh Phat), who becomes enamored with an attractive, melancholy war widow, Ky Nam (the lovely, Garbo-like Do Thi Hai Yen) in the same apartment complex, and in the end it cannot be. It's Vietnam postwar, an edgy, difficult time, with shortages, outages, poverty, and ingenuity. Khang has just come to Saigon from a well-placed northern family; his family's influence may be felt even here. On the grapevine, he's deemed a desirable prospect for some young woman. He has been granted by the government the plum job of doing a new "red" translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic Le Petit Prince (not a very long book as one naive online reviewer thought - that was the big French-Vietnamese dictionary he's using; it's a very short, but very famous and very French and very thought-provoking book). Its messages about sensitivity and listening to the heart and the foolishness of adults are freely referenced, but cannot be lived by in this sad world of gossipy neighbors and doomed romance Leon Lê has made into a meandering but beautiful and emotionally touching film.

Watching it and listening to the gentle, haunting score by Ton That An, you enter an achingly cozy bubble, lovingly recreated by and for people who do not know this time and place firsthand (but also as the director has said primarily made for the Vietnamese audience). Besides the outages, there is all the old culture, all the fresh ingredients of tasty food, and colorful locals, such as a chatty lady , an elderly tailor Luyến, (Ngô Hồng Ngọc), and another who purvey's folk remedies, Mr. Hạo (Lê Văn) . There are the inhabitants of the very interconnected apartment complex Khang is in, who gossip freely, and give advice.

Khang gets involved in helping beautiful, melancholy widow Ky Nam with food preparation at her little "inn," really just a takeout restaurant, it appears, though she is evidently a great cook, and this is a movie that celebrates food and food preparation and will make you want to go to a Vietnamese restaurant. Thus we also meet Su (The Manh Tran), the teenager Ky Nam has adopted and raised who is her kitchen helper just out of middle school. The problematic and outcast Su, a beautiful, somewhat fiery teenager, is the reason Ky Nam sprains her wrist and needs Khang's help in the kitchen. She gets hurt breaking up a fight between Su and other boys that has resulted from his being half white, fruit of a maudit union of a Vietnamese woman with an American soldier. Su bonds with Khang, who is also a kind of outsider, but a positive model of a powerful, or at least well-connected, one. They talk about the meaning of Le Petit Prince, whose story Khang recounts to Su as he works on the translation he shows him. The bond between Khang and Su helps tighten the gradually deepening bond between Khang and Ky Nam.

But the romance is not to be. Khang and Ky Nam attend a film with Su, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and, symbolically, the projection stops midway and the final reels can't be found. There is a graffiti on the sign for Ky Nam's food service about "border crossings." She is told directly about the disapproving opinions of the gossips by the lead gossip herself. And anyhow Khang's presence in Saigon is understood to be temporary. Nonetheless a separation is heartbreaking.

Despite repeated comparisons with Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love, this film, which is also forty minutes longer, depicts a different world from the one inhabited by the characters played by Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who are both married. Their 1962 British Hong Kong seems more sophisticated than 1980's Saigon, where the attraction between a young man from the north and a widow seems taboo. After a change of fortune involving Mr. Hao, the gossips seem to focus even more on their disapproval. Su's story is interwoven, and his inevitable moving away to be with a new adoptive family that will help him immigrate is a sign.

The lead actor Lien Binh Phat was the breakout, award-winning star with no previous experience in the same director's debut, the colorful 90's romance drama Song Lang (reviewed by me in 2019). The screenplays of these two films have obvious points of similarity and this, like Song Lang, was shot by Australian-born Bob Nguyen, this time not in a special digital setup but on 35mm film stock, again going for lush but restrained color. Director Leon Lê also has an interesting history. After a youth in Viet Nam he grew up from age 13 with his family in Southern California and became an actor, singer, dancer on Broadway; directing in Vietnam was another dream he achieved later. And he has certainly distinguished himself in that role.

There have been disapproving comments on the length of this film, and indeed its episodic nature, wealth of characters, and slow movement suggest Leon Lê could almost as well have shaped this material into a TV mini-series. Notice the couple's long wandering through the night toward the end of the film and meeting up with Khang's hero the eccentric poet Bùi Giáng. This could have been a separate movie. But then he might not have reached the same international audience. The number of festivals Ky Nam Inn has been shown as part of suggest it has that audience.

In a Variety interview with Essie Assibu the director emphasizes that for him Ky Nam Inn is not just a love story but about a reconciling of the two Vietnams, north and south. It is a step toward answering the question of, "What are we going to do now, after the war has ended, after the foreigners have left, and we have to live with each other again?” But it's a mark of the intelligence of this beautiful film that it never seems to be pushing an agenda or pondering Big Questions that overwhelm the moment-to-moment tactile reality of everything or the very personal, touching sense of a romance that cannot be. Isn't that the best kind?


THE MANH TRAN IN KY NAM INN

Ky Nam Inn (Quán Kỳ Nam/) 140 mins., premiered at Toronto (Special Presentations) Sept. 7, 2025, and also was included in the international festivals at Bangkok, Hawaii (Shooting Star Award), Stockholm, Taipei, QCinema (Philippines), Palm Springs, Moscow, Miami, Fribourg, and the Udine Far East Film Festival. This film was shown a few months ago at which where the
Penn’s Vietnamese Language Program in an exclusive screening followed by a reportedly lively discussion with the director. It was screened for this review as part of the NYAFF. Showtimes:
Sat, July 18
5:15 PM
Q&A with Leon Lê
Wed, July 22
2:45 PM

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