The editor’s note: This review was originally published in 2024 Kanes Film Festival. Strand Releasing opens ”Viet and Nam“On Friday March 28.
A number of films at this year’s Cannes have arrived at the festival surrounded in controversy. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” for his lead rolewith an actor that will soon go on trial for alleged abuse and sexual battery. Colleague Main competition title “Seed from the Holy Fikon,” Meanwhile, illegal in Iran, which led to director Mohammad Rasoulof being sentenced to eight years in prison and a flogging by the country’s authorities, which pressed the festival to draw the function from the competition; Rasoulof has since fled his homeland for Europe.
Flying a little under the radar in the UN is some consideration is a Vietnamese film that has been banned in Vietnam before he even got his world premiere in Cannes. The second feature – excluding a credit in an anthology – by author/director Truong Minh Quy (“The Tree House”), “Viet and Nam” is a queer romance that has shown controversial at home not for its characters, but reportedly for its presentation of “A gloomy, locked up and negative views” About the country and its citizens, according to an official letter from Vietnam’s cinema department.
Although it is far from the happiest films, this is a curious fate for a sensitive, transfixing drama that further shows the talents to one of Vietnam’s most exciting modern filmmakers. The film apparently canceled in 2001, as someone is referring to watching the news that morning and seeing a plane hits a skyscraper in New York. But among the cited effects on the beginning of the function is one Incident from 2019When 39 Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a refrigerator in Essex, England. Emigration through human trafficking is lined up for one of the film’s leads, although an ominous, abstract prologue sets a downfall tone for the possible trip that will not plan.
Shot at 16 mm, the film opens on Black near the tone jump, as what almost looks like snowflakes starts to fall when the sound of feet that tangles through water can be heard. A young man appears from the dark and slowly makes diagonally across the screen from the upper right corner to the lower left. As he approaches, his breathing sounds heavier, we see that he carries a shirt -free man on his back; Both men seem to be smeared in a black subject. We cannot say exactly where these two are, nor do the water that makes the noise as measures are taken, but it is very clear that this place is flooding.
After getting a few points (the film’s title card does not drop until close to 55 minutes in) the same two men are shown safe and healthy, or as safe and healthy as you can be when you sit down hundreds of meters underground. They are Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai), two coal miners who have found love for each other in a working environment that takes their fee on both the country and those who dare so far below the surface regularly. “Our lungs should now store a few kilos of coal,” Nam tells his mother, Hoa (Thi Nga Nguyen), in a scene.
“My eyes are getting weaker lately,” says one of them at another point. “Maybe I’ve spent too much time in the dark.” It may be so, but they are each other’s respective light in the dark. So it is understandable that Rift shows up when Nam wants to leave the country for new prospects, with the help of an agent who smuggles people in shipping containers. He is already training with others for some dangers waiting for him on the imminent journey, the preparations involving to be sealed in a barely human plastic bag and is drawn along a river bank by another person swimming. “When you’re over there,” Viet says to look at this training exercise at a distance, “I hope the river will be frozen so you can just walk on ice to cross the limit.”
In addition to just the risks involved in human trafficking, concerns about what happens to their relationship of stories as a local man, whose wife left the country to work as a caregiver when their daughter was only one month old, to send money home and get them out of poverty – that the child is now in elementary school, her mother still did not return to Vietnam. In addition, encouraged by her mother’s seemingly prophetic dreams (where she is apparently governed by her lost love), Nam wants to make some kind of peace with the father he never knew before leaving, who haunt him even in intimate moments with Viet.
During a post-coal scene, Viet dries from NAM’s naked body. Nam tells Viet that, “Every time I am CUM, closing my eyes tightly. I see a faceless man, dressed in a soldier uniform. Maybe it’s him. When you look at your face, it’s easier for me to imagine his face.” In one of the film’s temporary bodies of Deadpan -comedy, Viet, still cleaning, requests that Nam ceases to suggest that he may look like Nam’s father.
Nam’s father never returned from the war in the 1970s, alive or death to be buried, although veteran Ba (Viet Heavy Le), who was in the father’s soldiers, suggests that he has a gross idea of where he could have been when he died. Together with BA and Hoa, Viet and Nam travel all over the country to try to return to a path to the past, hopefully find Dad’s remains or at least answers, so that they can move on to their future. They are not the only ones on similar pilgrimage, with one of the most striking sequences during the second half involving our main party road roads with another group searching for the cemetery for another soldier who never came home.
The various composite travelers are led into nature by an alleged psychic who apparently channels the thoughts of the other deceased soldier, who was shot by fighting and buried by his comrades and thought they would soon come back to take his body home to his family. The psychic woman, her face painted white, is located in the place where she derived that the man was buried and cried as she regulates how decades passed in a moment. After the excavation takes place, a distinct stone is pulled off the ground. “This is the meat on your father’s head!” The guide tells the daughter who has been looking for her father. “The meat has turned into black dirt.”
Whether this character has shit this second group on a loosely similar quest with Viet and Nam, this key is one of the film’s most fascinating explorations of how the country’s past, present and future connect to the country. From revealing a soldier who has become part of the earth to the nature of Viet and Nam’s job in a Kolstad (with the consequences of pollution arising from coal mining), there is this feeling that the people cannot break away from reshaping the natural world around them in the search of destruction, response or a sense of purpose. Or did it through conflict, hammered home through an attempt at excitement instead of leading to an unetone mine.
Viet and Nam try to know the tragic deaths of unhappy people as Nam’s father, while their movie names are also trying to make similar to people like those who have been killed when trying to find a new life. Although mystery and dream -like logic are preferred to all clearly large statements. And while a degree of naturalism is still entering many slow scenes, Quy’s filmmaking is largely favored. There’s that mysterious opening sequence with the flooding (and scenes in the final act that eiter eith echo or audit it), but also these thrilling veers into the fantastic in even cheese mundane settings – in one location that a hybrid of a hybrid of Shot make’s it Seem Like Sparks are bursting from a man’s head.
A transcendent highlight for the surreal flowers comes in one of the film’s early darling scenes. It is a tight shot of Viet and Nam from their chests up, naked and to make out. They do so against a background of coal down the mine. But when the black cliff behind them sparkles, the sparks look like stars and the carbon surface is similar to the night sky or space. At this moment, while they came down hundreds of meters underground, their love for worlds rises above.
Rating: B+
“Viet and Nam” premiered at the Film Festival 2024 Cannes. Strand Releasing opens the movie Friday March 28.
