NYFF '24: "Viêt and Nam" finds heaven underground

by Cláudio Alves

In the darkness of the movie theater, filmmakers can conjure images the audience has never dreamed of. Sometimes, they reveal the impossible, dreams that only exist on the silver screen, that looking glass in endless molten metamorphosis. They can reflect the audience back to themselves and the world, too. Sometimes, they're the sweet secrets within your heart or fears you never even knew you had. The power of image-making cannot nor should it be underestimated. Watching Trương Minh Quý's Viêt and Nam, I felt such power, the wonder and awe. 

And it all starts underground, at the bottom of a mine. It starts somewhere where death waits, yet freedom blossoms. It's a trip down to hell that leads to paradise, temporary as it may be…

Though set at the start of the millennium - 2001, to be precise - Viêt and Nam could be confused for a documentary in its early passages. Or mayhap one of those fictitious non-fiction hybrids that have been all the rage since Flaherty proclaimed his Nanook was the truth and nothing but the truth. Still, there's a documentarian's rigor to Trương Minh Quý's footage of miners preparing to descend into a Vietnamese coal mine. The labor feels real enough, as does the sense that, at any moment, the walls could cave in and turn the movie shoot into a tomb. Down, down we go, with the camera and the miners to a place where the air is heavy with carbon.

In the beginning, those men feel like a collective of exploited bodies, but two of them soon stand apart. They are Viêt and Nam, and in the privacy of shadow and soot, the once anonymous workers become passion incarnate. Inklings of pleasure first manifest in abstract sensuality. Consider the sight of musculature going in and out of shadow, water dripping, movements repeated, dance-like. The quiet reprieve of a work pause provides a moment to catch one's breath, admire the bodies covered in made to look like burnished bronze in the low light. Viêt and Nam certainly look, stealing glances and touches, morsels of grace and queer joy.

Away from the world,  they are free to love each other. They do it on top of the coal pit, shot in brilliant 16mm by Quý and DP Soan Doan. Pardon the crude parlance, but it looks like they are fucking, free-floating, on the night sky. The coal glitters, starlight where stars can't be seen, and the bodies shimmer, whether with perspiration or cum. There, in the throes of pleasure, they can be honest in ways that are impossible on the surface world, where societal rules apply. Cleaning themselves, they may talk about their common losses, their dreams, and Nam will even share that he sees the vision of a soldier whenever he orgasms. 

Is it a fantasy? Is it the ghost of a dad lost in times of war? In the trance of their boundless bond, two young men without fathers find heaven and maybe even transcendence, or access to the beyond. They find freedom within a prison of hard labor and no hope for the future. That sad reality is why Viêt wants to leave, immigrate like many of his generation. Nam fears their split, he whispers pleas in the peculiar intimacy of leaning back and letting another man clean his ear of mineral deposits. "How long will I hear when you're no longer around?" – he asks, but we don't get the answer. That's theirs to know, a secret too intimate to share.

The specific moment marks a breaking point in the middle of the film. From the bowels of the earth to strolls by the sea, Viêt and Nam's first hour isn't completely consigned to the mines. Yet, they dominate the senses and themes. Various interludes outside find them with their mothers, being cared for in ways that echo their gentleness with each other. Still, there's a barrier between them, manifest in images like that of a look through mosquito nets or cold feet rustling under a blanket. The miracle of human connection is everywhere, but not everyone can enjoy its. Closed within themselves, these characters feel fundamentally alone.

Only the underground paradise remains, but after that structural rupture, it becomes unreachable, too. One hour in, Viêt and Nam confronts the spectator with a title card and the beginning of a second chapter that takes the couple, Nam's mother and a family friend, across the country in search of the patriarch's remains. It's the only way to properly grieve his passing, to stop this agony of incomplete mourning shared by multitudes of other Vietnamese people. The scars of war are present in the land and  their souls, impossible to ignore or forget. In this state of affairs, the erotic reverie turns into the excavation of a nation's history.

Though scenes of digging are poor substitutes for sublime sex, they are shot with as much care, an eye for the poetry contained in every gesture. But of course, this slow cinema odyssey isn't just eros and archeology. There's also the theater of a medium that promises to help those in the same situation as Nam and his mother. She organizes grand ghostly pantomimes, full of ritual weeping and living bodies possessed by spirits, re-enacting the moment of death. A bizarre tone-shift, these passages open the gates for humor in a skeptic's derisive snort. And then there's the electric buzz of a thriller when Viêt and Nam dig up a bomb instead of bones.

Trương Minh Quý further finds vulgarity in the solemn, going as far as staging a lovers' spat that culminates in the tartness of "I know why you're going away…to get white dick." Hand in hand with the lark comes sorrow, more heartfelt than one might suppose for such a glacially-paced experience. Nam's mother becomes a secondary lead, for example, suggesting a parallel between the failed communication of the living and the dead and the stilted conversations of men in love, unable to say what they really feel when not in the heart of the mine. It all builds up, crescendo-style, to a finale full of gut-wrenching implications, a Tarkovskian beauty that represents some of the best that cinema has to offer in 2024. It took my breath away.

Viêt and Nam is banned in its home country, but Trương Minh Quý has been embraced in the festival circuit, including the NYFF.