Review: Việt and Nam – Chicago Reader

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Việt and Nam is a dreamy and meditative exploration of loss, grief, and the lingering remnants of war. The title characters, played respectively by Đào Duy Bảo Định and Phạm Thanh Hải, are two coal miners in rural north Vietnam in 2001. The lovers share daily moments of intimacy, explicit in the mine and restrained outside of it. A tender melancholy hangs over their relationship as Nam plans to soon leave the country—Việt both mourning and questioning his decision.

Early on, a television broadcast shares the details of still-missing soldiers and the family members searching for them, while Nam and his mother, Hoa (Nguyễn Thị Nga), move around their home forming coal briquettes. We soon find out, through Hoa’s recounting of her dreams, that Nam’s father is among those who died decades earlier, his grave still unfound. Accompanied by Việt and the father’s former soldier friend Ba (Le Viet Tung), the family travel to the ghostly southern front—speckled with buried MK-82 bombs, families searching for their loved ones, and psychics, both genuine and deceptive, who offer to help them look—to search for a tree from Hoa’s dreams.

The narrative unfolds like a memory play, flowing with the characters’ emotions, shifting between dreams and reality as they reckon with both past and impending loss. Writer-director Trương Minh Quý and cinematographer Son Doan impart the dreamlike quality of the story into the visuals: the camera sits a bit removed and untouched in moments of conversation or shows vast, abstract visuals of the sea and surroundings. Even the mine’s grittiness converts to night sky—anthracite sparkling like stars—in moments between the young couple.

The relationship between the two young men is passionate and grounding, even as their future together seems doomed. The sensual moments are raw and deep: as they lie naked in the mines, Việt licks blood from Nam’s abdomen, and, in another striking moment, Nam stares in Việt’s eyes, swallowing the wax and debris he just removed from his ear. And their relationship still comes into the light: they orbit around each other as they walk down the beach and, while Nam paints his mother’s nails, she tells him to bring Việt around more. Việt later surprises Nam with a birthday cake, to which he asks, “What if someone sees us?” Việt responds, “I’ll pretend we’re brothers.”

It may seem at times that Việt’s life is less fleshed out than Nam’s, as his story remains largely a mystery with only glimpses at his life. (He at one point says to Nam, “You and I, two boys without a father.”) But it soon becomes clear that the oneness of the two is exactly the point. Wide shots often make them, with the same haircuts and work uniforms, nearly indistinguishable. The two are even credited together as Việt/Nam. In his director’s statement, Quý explains that their similarities give their story a mythical quality: “Two persons who share everything, but soon they must face a future of separation.”

Grounded in the personal and psychological, Quý’s film takes as its points of departure broader historical traumas, the Vietnam war, and the senseless deaths of Vietnamese emigrants, like the 39 people who, in 2019, were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Essex, United Kingdom. Although set before this specific tragedy, the characters carry its weight as Nam’s journey approaches. When they speak of their separation, the graver risks of the journey go unspoken, making them feel even heavier. Through poetic interwoven narratives, Việt and Nam explores death away from loved ones and the dreams and irresolvable unease it brings to them. 129 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center