Viet And Nam (Vietnamese)
The clearest measure of the film’s problem is its allocation of time: across a two-hour runtime, Viet and Nam’s romance gets barely twenty minutes. I was bored out of my mind for most of the rest. I’m not usually drawn to pretentious art-house films that pile on themes until it’s hard to tell what message they’re delivering, whose journey matters, or what the director wants the audience to understand. Here, the bleak atmosphere is certainly intense—the story unfolds just after the war in Vietnam—but I couldn’t decide whether the film wanted to tell a queer love story or simply immerse itself in misery.
Viet and Nam are a young couple making ends meet through punishing work far underground in coal mines. Despite their poverty, they find happiness together, stealing glances, sharing quick kisses, and sometimes being physical in the shadows when no one is nearby. Their private life unfolds largely apart from everything else: in the dark mines, they show their desire and talk quietly about what might come next. Those scenes have a raw, gentle quality, but there are so few of them. Beyond a handful of brief kisses and one passionate moment, the film offers little romance.
The story’s deeper preoccupation seems to be the way war’s trauma persists into the next generation. Nam never knew his father, a soldier missing in action whose remains were never found, but he feels compelled to learn how and where he died. His widowed mother remains haunted by the loss. She says she has spiritual intuition and often senses her husband’s ghost nearby. She notices the closeness between Nam and Viet without demanding an explanation, instead welcoming Viet to dinner as a quiet sign of acceptance.
As people nearby leave the exhausting mine work for better opportunities elsewhere, Nam dreams of going abroad too. But he cannot bring himself to choose between a new life and staying with his mother or the man he loves. Before he slips out of Vietnam, he travels with his mother, her companion, and Viet to find the precise place where his father died. This journey gives the lingering effects of the war more weight than the romance, which is part of why the film’s focus felt so misplaced to me.
Local censors banned the film entirely in its home country. I wasn’t in the mood for something this relentlessly grim, and the scarcity of queer content leaves it in an awkward position: it may not offer enough to attract a gay audience, while also alienating traditional moviegoers who avoid those themes. Add the depressing ending, and I found it hard not to see the film as a bid for awards at places like Cannes. It’s a gloomy, confusing festival piece that loses sight of its central couple. I wouldn’t recommend sitting through it. (3/10)