2025 marks half a century since the ceasefire of the Vietnam War, but in the small Southeast Asian country, physical vestiges of the brutal conflict continue to be unearthed in the form of forgotten munitions and skeletal remains, dark souvenirs from a past that persist in haunting in the contemporary. Viet and Nam, the latest film from Truong Minh Quy, uniquely explores these exhumations of the Vietnamese spirit and its modern history, working as a singular spin on a ghost story wrapped in a heartbreaking romantic drama. Boasting a languid pace and an incredibly ethereal visual language that is impossible to shake, Truong's Viet and Nam confirms the auteur's status as another prominent addition to Vietnam's rising crop of gifted filmmakers.

The movie is set in 2001, concentrating on Viet and Nam, two young men who spend their days working deep underground in a rural coal mine. Inextricable lovers, the duo utilizes their subterranean time in one another's embrace, exercising a freedom of togetherness inconceivable above ground. Nam lives with his aging mother, widowed when her husband never returned from his stint as a Viet Cong soldier during the war. Nam and his mother share a caring and compassionate connection, making it all the more difficult when Nam sets his mind on leaving the country and heading for the Western world for better economic prospects. In the final days leading up to Nam's illicit departure, he and Viet dedicate their time to one another, along with aiding Nam's mother in searching for his father's remains, based on symbols and clues she discovers within her dreams every night. Through their pursuit, each character's linkage to their scarred national past signals an individual transformation that alters their metaphysical paths evermore.

Through its two-hour-plus runtime, Viet and Nam begets a visual and spiritual journey into the bowels of Vietnam's traumatic recent history, illustrating characters stranded in a reality suspended between a troubled past and an uncertain future. Phantoms of yore continue to haunt the lush landscapes of the film's bucolic setting, with figures desperately turning to spiritual gurus and transmissions from their subconscious to attain a peace of mind that may never relieve the deep-seated suffering of their souls.

Bisected into two distinctive sections, the film's first half remains fixated on the tender relationship between Viet and Nam. Forced to hide their romance from the public –– as homosexuality was still a serious taboo in Vietnam during the film's period setting –– Viet and Nam carry out their relationship in the seclusion of the forests and their belowground workplace. Truong paints their queer connection with profound sensitivity, showcasing radiant moments of intimacy with a sensual enchantment that brings us closer to understanding their deep attachment as outsiders in their homeland.

From this emphasis on the romantic bond between the two men, the film's latter section recenters its focus to the search for the remains of Nam's father with a wistful, if not melancholic, intensity. Nam's mother possesses a mysterious intuition that prohibits her late husband from leaving her memory. "I realize that if my heart throbs that night, I'll dream of him." Recollection serves as a significant focal point of the film, with characters adhering to their pasts in ways that cannot allow them to see their country unattached to its violent history. This force compels Nam and peripheral characters to leave their land in search of a fresh start far away from Vietnam.

Working with director of photography Son Doan, Truong creates a visual sensibility in Viet and Nam that mesmerizes from the first image, functioning as one of the film's most compelling and dynamic elements. With 16mm film, the movie's cinematography showcases the textural grain of the stock to add touches of surrealism in otherwise mundane instants, transforming moments in the coal mines into glittering starscapes or village-bordering patches of forest into primordial jungles. Many shots are particularly drawn out with a method that feels deeply attuned to the most experiential elements of movie-watching, wholly freed from the conventions and expectations of mainstream cinema.

In Viet and Nam, specters of the past and present intermingle somewhere between reality and dreams, forming a work of great mystery and immense anguish in its understanding of Vietnam and its history. Through the enigmatically tragic journey of its central queer figures, the movie reaches a hypnotic plane of spirituality, both on an individual and collective level, for all of its characters. Despite deliberate pacing that could challenge some audiences, the film’s unhurried pacing is worth the payoff, delivering a heartbreaking final shot that is hard to forget.

4/5

2024 | 129 min| Color |Vietnamese, with English subtitles

'Viet and Nam' begins its theatrical release in the United States on Friday, March 28, courtesy of Strand Releasing. Click here to find a showtime near you.

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