A dreamy story of queer love and historical trauma

The opening moments of Zhang Minggui’s third feature film vietnam and southIn the picture, a slender figure appears from one corner of the picture and then slides to another corner. He looked like a ghost, an ethereal entity wading through the enveloping darkness. White snowflakes floated around him, dotting the dark expanse like stars in the night sky. When the shrill ringing of a bell interrupts the constructed reverie, a more realistic scene comes into focus: two men hurriedly button up their shirts and get back to work.

vietnam and southThe film, which premiered at the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival in May and debuts at the New York Film Festival this week, is a dreamy look at romance and haunted history. Its protagonists – Viet (played by Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (played by Pham Thanh Hai) – are lovers whose relationship blossoms in the underground corridors of a mine in northern Vietnam. The first layer of the film revolves around the issues that plague the couple after Nan announces that he is leaving the country. It was the early 2000s, shortly after 9/11, and Nam planned to pay traffickers to smuggle him out in shipping containers. The news destabilizes Vietnam, forcing him to think about what a future without his lover would be like.

Parallel to this heartbreaking narrative is the story of survival of a country surrounded by the legacy of war, where even a landscape littered with unexploded bombs remains a threat. The banning of Quay’s film in Vietnam (presumably because of the director’s “dark and negative” portrayal of the homeland) illustrates the sensitivity of these unhealed wounds. Quay (tree house), the relationship between Nam, his mother Hoa (played by Nguyen Thi Nga), his dead father and his father’s friend Ba (played by Le Viet Thong) is a brain problem caused by historical trauma. In exploring how past ruptures map onto present relationships, he elegantly explores a familiar theme: how war affects generations, imposing itself on those who witnessed it and those who succeeded it.

His father was killed somewhere in the country’s southern region during the war before Nam was born, and his father’s legacy haunts Nam’s subconscious and body. The unburied soldier appears to him and his mother in dreams, and throughout it, Hoa sometimes remarks how much her son resembles him. Despite never having met him, Nam is intrigued to learn where and how his father died, and before absconding from Vietnam, he embarks on a journey with Hoa, Ba and Viet to find the place where his father died. Isn’t this what war or any hereditary trauma does to the living spirit? Forcing us to search and dig?

strongest sequence vietnam and south New ways of understanding this horrific legacy are proposed. They connect Nam’s relationship with Vietnam to his search for his father, clarifying the young man’s desire to leave Vietnam even if it means being separated from this true love. The recurring dialogue between Nan and his mother reveals the impact the conflict still has on their psyches. In scenes where Nam travels with his family through a forested area near Cambodia, his father’s spirit appears to possess him. He becomes a fallen soldier and pieces together fragments of stories he’s heard over the years to imagine his father’s final moments in a surreal scene.

The relationship in Vietnam and South America is a dream in itself, realized mostly in the mines, where they consummate their love and negotiate their hopes. Quay collaborated with cinematographer Son Doan to capture these scenes with a candid tenderness. The sensuality of these moments is reminiscent of Payal Kapadia’s sex scenes Everything we imagine is lightequally adept at capturing the ecstasy of youthful romance with a soft touch.

Hai and Dinh portray their characters with the right amount of pathos and subtle moments of humor, their understated chemistry, and a harrowing final scene that leaves one wishing Quy indulged more in the relationship between these two. The director (edited by Felix Rehm) liberates the plot from linearity and arranges the sequence of events deftly, thereby enhancing its meditative quality. But for those less willing to submit to associative thinking, this approach can be a battle. It also makes the relationship between Vietnam and South America, filled with so many shocking moments, strangely feel secondary to the excavations of history. Compared to Vietnam, much of Vietnam remains a mystery.

While the movie hints at a degree of interchangeability between the two—the end credits list the characters as “Vietnamese/Vietnamese” and then mention both actors by name—the two are still individual enough to deserve more Lots of information. Regardless of its relationship with Vietnam, what impact has history had on Vietnam? The film is over two hours long, and an extension might have eased the tension. Quy accomplished something special vietnam and south. That’s reason enough to stay in its world.