‘Viet and Nam’ Review: History Is a Shallow Grave in a Plaintive, Penumbral Queer Romance
Jessica Kiang Late 20th-century Vietnamese history casts a trancelike spell across Truong Minh Quy‘s “Viet and Nam,” a thickly shadowed exploration – or should that be excavation? — of national trauma and its habit of living on, in spectral form, through subsequent generations.
Given an edge of radical newness by its frank, grimily beautiful portrayal of gay lovemaking (seldom have the body-contouring properties of coal dust on sweat-slicked skin been more sensuously explored), still, the rhythms of Truong’s film are slow, and the curtains-drawn darkness of much of its 16mm imagery may induce a state of meandering, semi-directed sleepiness.
But then perhaps Truong does not mean us to watch “Viet and Nam” so much as he wants us doze and dream our way in and out of it.
It is 2001 and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) and Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) — never distinctly identified as such within the film and given a joint “Nam/Viet” credit in the closing scroll — are two young coalminers in rural Vietnam involved in a tender but illicit relationship.
