A Dreamy Tale of Queer Love and Historic Trauma

In the opening moments of Truong Minh Quy’s third feature Viet and Nam, a svelte figure emerges from one corner of the frame and glides to another. He seems like an apparition, an unreal entity wading through an enveloping blackness. White flakes float around him, dotting the dark expanse like stars against a night sky. When the shrill whine of a bell interrupts the constructed reverie, a more realistic scene comes into focus: Two men rush to button up their shirts and resume their work. 

Viet and Nam, which premiered at Cannes in May in the Un Certain Regard sidebar before bowing this week at New York Film Festival, is a dreamy observation of romantic devotion and haunted histories. Its protagonists  — Viet, played by Dao Duy Bao Dinh, and Nam, played by Pham Thanh Hai — are lovers whose relationship blooms in the underground corridors of a mine in northern Vietnam. The first layer of the film revolves around the questions that plague the couple once Nam announces he’s leaving the country. It’s the early 2000s, shortly after 9/11, and Nam plans to pay a trafficker to smuggle him out through a shipping container. The news destabilizes Viet, forcing him to reckon with what a future without his lover looks like. 

Running parallel to this heartbreaking narrative is the existential tale of a nation so besieged by the legacy of war that even the landscape, pocked with undetonated bombs, remains a threat. That Quy’s feature has been banned in Vietnam (speculatively because of the director’s “dark and negative” portrayal of his home country) speaks to the sensitivity of these still open wounds. Quy (The Tree House) grounds cerebral questions of historical trauma in the relationship between Nam, his mother Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), his dead father and his father’s friend Ba (Le Viet Tung). In exploring how the ruptures of the past map themselves onto relationships in the present, he elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates throughout generations, imposing on witnesses and their successors.

The legacy of his father — killed before Nam’s birth during the war, somewhere in the southern region of the country — haunts Nam’s subconsciousness and his body. The unburied soldier comes to him and his mother in their dreams, and there are moments throughout when Hoa remarks on how much her son resembles him. Despite never having laid eyes on him, Nam feels drawn to understand where and how his father passed, and before absconding from Vietnam embarks on a journey with Hoa, Ba and Viet to find the site of his death. Isn’t that how war, or any inherited trauma, works on living spirits? Compelling us to search and exhume?

The strongest sequences in Viet and Nam present new ways to understand this grisly inheritance. They braid Nam’s relationship to Viet with his search for his father, clarifying the younger man’s desire to leave Vietnam even if it means separating from this true love. Circular conversations between Nam and his mother reveal the hold that the conflict still has on their psyche. In a scene in which Nam traverses a forested area near Cambodia with his family, the spirit of his father seems to seize him. He becomes the fallen soldier and, piecing together fragments of stories he’s heard over the years, imagines his father’s final moments in voiceover during a surreal sequence.

Viet and Nam’s relationship is its own kind of dream, carried out mostly in the mines where they consummate their love and negotiate their hopes. Working with his cinematographer Son Doan, Quy films these scenes with a frank tenderness. The sensuousness of these moments recall the sex scene in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which was similarly adept at capturing the ecstasy of youthful romance with a soft touch.

Hai and Dinh portray their characters with appropriate pathos and moments of subtle humor, and their understated chemistry, as well as a wrenching final scene, makes one wish that Quy indulged more in how these two relate to each other. The director (with editing by Félix Rehm) liberates the plot from linearity and plays with the order of events, which bolsters its meditative quality. But the approach might be a struggle for those less inclined to submit to associative trains of thoughts. It also makes the relationship between Viet and Nam, filled with so many striking moments, feel oddly secondary to the historical disinterment. So much of Viet remains a mystery, as compared to Nam. 

Although the movie suggest there’s a degree of interchangeability in the pair — the end credits list the characters as “Viet/Nam” and then name both actors — the men are still individual enough to warrant more information. How does history weigh on Viet irrespective of his relationship with Nam? Lengthening the film, which runs a little over two hours, might have eased that tension. Quy has accomplished something special with Viet and Nam. That’s enough of a reason to stay in its world.