The haunting abstractions of queer drama ‘Việt and Nam’

The film’s title, which divides the name of the country in two, mirrors the north-south divisions of the conflict, but in a more intimate sense, it echoes irreconcilable wholes that ought to be one. Its young characters—coal miners in their mid 20s, whose romance is kept secret—yearn to be together in the open, which makes Việt eager to leave Vietnam. At the same time, ghosts of the past loom large over Nam, who lives with his mother, Hoa (Nguyễn Thị Nga), who dreams every night of a husband who disappeared during the war. Nam never knew his father, but he interprets his mother’s dreams as clues to where his remains might be buried.

This yields a deeply moving second half—after the movie’s title card finally arrives, nearly an hour in—wherein Việt, Nam and Hoa travel south along with a former soldier, Ba (Lê Việt Tụng), who fought alongside Nam’s father, and now acts as their tour guide through the past. Although the film is split in two, its disparate plots are bound by a distinct aesthetic. Trương unfurls his story carefully and gradually, with lengthy silences punctuated by poetic dialogue, allowing the emotional weight of the group’s morose quest to settle in the pit of your stomach. Việt and Nam is as “slow cinema” as arthouse fare can get, but it’s also a tale of great melancholy, whose grief rises and recedes unpredictably, amidst seemingly ordinary scenes.

Việt and Nam are coal miners in their mid 20s, whose romance is kept secret.

Nicolas Graux

The movie is set somewhere in the early aughts, but it feels both timeless (in its lack of period-specific details) and yet, tethered to the era in which Nam’s father disappeared. Its faded celluloid quality, and the battered flaws in its texture, makes it feel like a dormant artifact rediscovered, as if a lost film from the 1970s had been unearthed. Fittingly, Nam and his mother are on a similar journey: to find a man’s remains, in the hopes of spiritual catharsis.

There are always multiple forces at play in Trương’s films. For instance, his 2019 docu-fiction piece Nhà Cây (or The Treehouse) is both a linguistic and cultural examination of real indigenous tribes, as well as a sci-fi movie set in the future—seemingly immiscible worlds that should not mix, but whose combination reveals stunning dramatic layers. Việt and Nam works much the same way. As much as it’s a confrontation of death in search of closure, this pursuit is equally linked to its title characters’ mischievous, subdued romance. When they make love, in the quiet, ethereal confines of the coal mines, the shimmering rocks they lie on begin to resemble stars in the night sky. The universe itself fades into view, imbuing Nam’s eventual search with an existential importance. The film may have a withdrawn and somber quality, but fleeting interactions between its leading duo (involving suppressed smiles in the presence of onlookers) turn it briefly exciting.

Their love, and their potential future, is what’s at stake, and while the movie never says it outright, their romance cannot flourish unless Nam understands where he comes from. Their subsequent journey—involving gaudy catacomb exhibits, mannequin displays, and dioramic re-enactments of soldiers standing motionless—is through a nation at a standstill, unable to heal its scars. Việt and Nam ought to be one, but they can’t. At least, not until they stare into the abyss of a painful past.

"Việt and Nam" premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Nicolas Graux

Through quiet abstractions, Trương’s wordlessly exhumes the lingering anxieties at the heart of his characters, and the rural landscape to which they belong (on which the camera remains fixated on for lengthy stretches). The horrors of war trickle down generationally, infecting a gorgeous and exciting romantic saga until the two halves of the movie become intrinsically bound, resulting in a singular cinematic consciousness beyond the boundaries of genre and expectation. In Việt and Nam, every border eventually blurs, revealing new shapes and new perspectives.