A dreamy story about queer love and historical trauma

In the opening moments of Truong Minh Quy’s third feature film Vietnam and Nama slim figure emerges from one corner of the frame and slides into another. He seems like an apparition, an unreal being wading through an all-encompassing blackness. White flakes float around it, dotting the dark surface like stars in the night sky. As the shrill ringing of a bell interrupts the constructed reverie, a more realistic scene comes into focus: two men hurrying to button their shirts and continue their work.

Vietnam and Namwhich premiered at Cannes in the sidebar Un Certain Regard in May before screening at the New York Film Festival this week, is a dreamy observation of romantic devotion and eerie tales. 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 level of the film revolves around the questions that concern the couple when Nam announces that he is leaving the country. It’s the early 2000s, just after 9/11, and Nam plans to pay a human trafficker to smuggle him out in a shipping container. The news destabilizes Viet and forces him to consider what a future without his lover will look like.

Running parallel to this heartbreaking narrative is the existential story of a nation so besieged by the legacy of war that even the landscape littered with unexploded bombs remains a threat. The fact that Quy’s feature film was banned in Vietnam (speculatively due to the director’s “dark and negative” portrayal of his home country) testifies to the sensitivity of these still open wounds. Quy (The treehouse) explores intellectual questions about 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). By examining how the fractures of the past affect relationships in the present, he elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates across generations and impacts witnesses and their successors.

The legacy of his father, who was killed during the war somewhere in the south of the country before Nam was born, haunts Nam’s subconscious and his body. The Unburied Soldier comes to him and his mother in their dreams, and there are moments when Hoa notices how much her son resembles him. Even though he has never seen him before, Nam wants to find out where and how his father died. Before escaping Vietnam, he goes on a journey with Hoa, Ba and Viet to find the place of his death. Isn’t this how war or inherited trauma affects living minds? Force us to search and exhume?

The strongest sequences in Vietnam and Nam present new ways to understand this grisly legacy. They link Nam’s relationship with Vietnam to his search for his father, highlighting the younger man’s desire to leave Vietnam, even if it means a separation from that true love. Circular conversations between Nam and his mother reveal the impact the conflict still has on her psyche. In a scene in which Nam and his family are crossing a forest area near Cambodia, the ghost of his father seems to take hold of him. He becomes a fallen soldier and, in a surreal offscreen sequence, imagines his father’s final moments by piecing together fragments of stories he has heard over the years.

The Viet Nam relationship is its own kind of dream, realized largely in the mines where they consummate their love and negotiate their hopes. Working with his cinematographer Son Doan, Quy films these scenes with open tenderness. The sensuality of these moments is reminiscent of the sex scene in Payal Kapadia Everything we imagine as lightwhich was also adept at capturing the ecstasy of youthful romance with a gentle touch.

Hai and Dinh portray their characters with appropriate pathos and moments of subtle humor, and their understated chemistry and a thrilling final scene leave you wanting Quy to be more invested in how the two interact. The director (editor: Félix Rehm) frees the plot from linearity and plays with the sequence of events, which enhances its meditative quality. However, for those less inclined to submit to associative reasoning, this approach may be difficult. It also makes the relationship between Vietnam and Nam, which has so many remarkable moments, seem strangely secondary to the historical excavation. Much of Vietnam remains a mystery compared to Nam.

Although the film suggests that the pair have a degree of interchangeability – the credits list the characters as “Vietnam” and then name both actors – the men are still individual enough to warrant further information. How does history weigh on Vietnam, regardless of its relationship to Vietnam? Lengthening the film, which lasts just over two hours, might have alleviated this tension. Quy has achieved something special Vietnam and Nam. That’s reason enough to stay in his world.