Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam has some haunting visuals of queer love, never seen in cinema from any part of the world, certainly not in cinema in our country where same-stories are queered by awkward embarrassing visuals of intimacy.
Here, the intimate interludes are shot like paintings from a time when censorship didn’t exist: they are that explicit. The tone and of texture of these sequences, shot in the grimy fading light in a coal mine, suggest a kind of timeless beauty that isn’t compatible with the grim grimy bleakness that runs across the movie’s saddening skyline.
Viet and Nam, played by Duy Bao Dinh Dao and Pham Thanh Hai, are captured against a perpetually despondent landscape. There is not much joy in making love inside a coalmine, buried thousands of feet underground. On ground level, there is no joy to be had, unless we see Nam’s mother Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga) as a beacon of hope.
She tenderly exhorts her son to bring his lover home, which he does. It is a joyless dinner with Nam, Viet, Nam’s mother and her male dinner guest, a colleague of the mother’s MIA husband, feasting on frogs
Save your queasy responses for later. There is much here that is not easy to digest. A large part of the film has Nam and his mother searching for their missing father’s grave. This departure from the main love story is jarring, yoking as it does, a timeless love story to crippling tradition, thereby portraying a country in tedious transition.
It is ironical that the narration, in its quest to balance the radical romance with a ritualistic search for a missing grave, seems to be trapped in the same conundrum as the two protagonists. Their passionate togetherness is stymied by the pursuit of a spiritual gratification that entitles the plot to move beyond the tradition-challenging love affair.
What I carried away from this tonally inflected gay love story is the mutual passion of two people whose feelings are submerged in the gloomy pursuit of tradition in a country which doesn’t quite know how to cope with the winds of liberalism. Until they do, same-sex love would have to find a release deep under the ground.
