The opening shot ofTrương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam depicts two men in enveloping darkness. One carries the other on his back as he trudges through what looks less like a real place on Earth than a lifeless void in outer space. Yet the accompanying sound suggests some kind of terrestrial reality: trickling water, soft footsteps, labored breathing, the echoes of each reverberating against unseen boundaries. The sequence merely hints at what the rest of the film has in store, in which the world its characters can see, touch, and kiss is bound by and lives in perpetual proximity to dreams of death.
The characters in Việt and Nam are guided almost entirely by their dreams. At the beginning of the film, its titular coal miners and lovers, Nam (Phąm Thanh Hài) and Việt (Đào Duy Bảo Định), are secluded in their own private enclave under the earth. In each others’ arms, Nam describes the dangerous journey he is set to take in order to leave Vietnam for a better life, including his fear of getting trapped inside the human-sized plastic bag he’ll use to cross the river. As Việt listens lovingly, you get the sense that he won’t be joining him. Nam’s mother, Hoa (Nguyên Thį Nga), is also haunted by a dream. She keeps seeing her long-dead husband, Nam’s father, whom he never met and who probably never knew he existed, by a mysterious tree. She’s certain that she can find him, or at least what is left of his body. Along with Nam, Việt, and an older man, Ba (Lê Viêt Tųng), who served with Nam’s father during the war, she travels deep into the forest, guided only by this faint dream and Ba’s hazy, possibly guilt-laden, memories of the war.
Trương positions the film’s central quartet within a larger context of missing soldiers. News broadcasts announce the names of martyrs and repeat the pleas from their family members for information regarding their whereabouts. Early in their search, Nam, Việt, Hoa, and Ba cross paths with a famous psychic leading a group of people into the forest. She’s an imposing, almost alien being amongst the mourners, bound to Earth by their grief. Her pink, flowing garment is also in sharp relief to her seemingly working-class customers’ practical attire; her face is painted white in a cartoonish bid to distinguish herself, a posture which suggests her psychic practice might be a cash grab that just happens to provide grieving widows some solace. Trương refuses definitive judgments toward the psychic’s intentions or abilities; instead, he deftly poses her and her followers as just one scenario within a country’s collective mourning.
While there is emotional urgency in the search for Nam’s father, Trương resists the urge to match it in his filmmaking. Scenes play out in long, unbroken shots, with minimal dialogue spoken in an abnormally protracted cadence. The effect is a trance-like sense of passing time, a useful quality for a film whose characters’ presents are constantly troubled by both history and the future. Trương further suspends the viewers’ sense of time with several breaks in the narrative timeline. He gives no indication if the jumps we experience are forward or backward, but each one wakes up the viewer. The jump from the forest where Nam, Việt, Hao, and Ba dig for what they hope is Nam’s father to a rural office where Nam updates his passport photo is a stark reminder of how closely Nam’s yet-to-be-resurfaced past is linked to his unrealized future. Trương’s deliberately illogical treatments of time sit naturally within the film, even if they still exert demands on even the most patient of viewers.
For a film whose atmosphere takes precedence over its narrative, the final 30 minutes are, surprisingly, filled with what you might call spoilers. Without elaborating on them, it’s enough to say that this final half hour is a solemn march towards Nam and Việt’s separation, though that’s not necessarily the destination. Instead, Việt and Nam constantly pulls its central characters closer to the realm of the dead. Even the film’s early moments of levity — shared watermelon and birthday cake in an empty cafe, Nam painting his mother’s nails while she tells him to bring Việt home more often, sparks flying in a barber shop while Việt and Nam pick the wax out of each others’ ears — are not enough to move the film’s needle significantly away from death by the end; characters are constantly called toward it, whether in their dreams or not. It’s like a curse, where moments of joy are never found too far away from tragedy. But the opposite is true, as well. Those with the patience to see Việt and Nam to its end will cling to that alternative.
DIRECTOR: Trương Minh Quý; CAST: Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 9 min.
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