‘Viet and Nam’ Review: A Hypnotic Romance Haunted by History (MUBI)

A convergence of stories—familial, romantic, national—unfolds in Viet and Nam, the intriguing and visually seductive film by Truong Minh Quy. In many respects, the film bears a clear stylistic debt to the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. And while that influence—along with other festival-coded gestures—is evident in its familiar rhythms, the Vietnamese director still finds a distinctive way to map the story of an individual, a family, and a country.

Viet and Nam are two young men who, in the early 2000s, work side by side in a dark, dangerous mine in northern Vietnam. During breaks, they talk and make love, always in secret, hidden from their co-workers. Despite their relationship, Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) is planning to leave Vietnam, escaping through a somewhat convoluted plan that involves hiding inside a shipping container. That decision intensifies and complicates his bond with the more opaque Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh), a character the film deliberately keeps underdeveloped.

Running parallel—and ultimately proving just as important—is another storyline that involves Nam more directly. His father died in the war with the United States in the mid-1970s, never having met his son, and his body was never recovered. Nam’s mother, Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), repeatedly dreams of seeing and speaking with him, yet has no idea where his remains might be. It is a situation shared by many families, to the point that such cases are mentioned daily on television.

In her search, Hoa teams up with “Uncle” Ba (Le Viet Tung), a friend and fellow soldier who fought alongside her husband. Together with Viet and Nam, they set out to locate the body, following a supposed psychic who claims to know where the missing dead are buried and organizes expeditions for others in the same situation. As the film alternates between the pleasures and tensions of the young men’s relationship—Viet and Nam includes a couple of relatively frank sex scenes—and this collective quest, Quy engages directly with the lingering traumas of the conflict known in the West as the Vietnam War, and in Vietnam as the “War Against the United States.”

These narrative strands are far more diffuse on screen than this summary suggests. Time seems to fracture repeatedly, family relationships are not always clear, and the distant framing and 16mm cinematography, elegant as it is, can turn deliberately confusing amid the pervasive darkness. Thematically, however, the film is anything but obscure—so much so that it was banned in Vietnam for allegedly presenting the country in a negative light. That clarity of intent, combined with the eloquence of the mise en scène, is ultimately what matters. The film moves at the slow, hypnotic pace associated with Weerasethakul’s work and rarely strays from that register.

That tone opens up a suggestive space between reality, dream, and fable. On several occasions—and largely due to how scenes are staged and shot—Viet and Nam seems to operate in an oneiric realm where it is never entirely clear what is happening and what is imagined. One character believes he can see the dead embedded in clumps of earth; at times, coal resembles a star-filled sky; even the film’s timelines appear to overlap and intersect like pieces of a puzzle. These choices produce contradictory effects: they complicate interpretation while simultaneously deepening the atmosphere of melancholy and seductive mystery that envelops the entire film.