TIFF 2024
▞ Introduction
▞ 8. Band of Outsiders: On Neo Sora’s Happyend
▞ 7. The Soul of an Artist: On Hong Sang-soo’s By The Stream
▞ 6. The Two Maidens: On Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam
▞ 5. The Master and Her Muse: On Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides
▞ 4. Self-Studies: On Sook-Yin Lee’s Paying for It
▞ 3. The Inheritance: On All Shall Be Well and The Paradise of Thorns
▞ 2. A World of Pain: On Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud
▞ 1. Mise en abyme: On Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film
Trương Minh Quý (director), Viet and Nam, 2024. 129 min.
The form of Viet and Nam reminded me of the form of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “two blocks joined by a corridor.” In the film, the title card—Viet and Nam—creates the split, which happens around the 45-minute mark, bringing the director Trương Minh Quý into conversation with the aesthetics of the work of Bi Gan, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Phạm Thiên Ân’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Woolf’s name for this split was “Time Passes”.
In Trương’s film, a place-change occurs: a woman, her son, his lover, and her late husband’s comrade go in search of his corpse in the jungle. Because Trương’s aesthetic preference is long, slightly moving takes, it allows him to stage sequences where a lot of movement is happening within the frame, producing a hypnotic—and potentially narcotic—effect, as in the jungle, when the men—sweaty and determined—relentlessly bring the shovel up and right back down; earlier, in the mines, the young men transport shovels full of coal, at first incongruously, then in sync.
In the first half—the film takes place in 2001 and there is a reference to 9/11—we have two lovers who can’t keep their hands off each other. They sneak in a sooty kiss during a break at work. They hold hands under the table when the mother has left the table for a second. They graze each other’s faces. They wipe runny semen off each other’s thighs and show how deep their love is by licking up their blood. They eat each other’s ear wax. But what’s love got to do with it? Well, as the Indian director PayPal Kapadia has said, “love is a very political entity”. All these testaments to the beauty and the power of queer romance end up serving the sensation that a lover experiences when their beloved has made the decision to leave and that you have made the decision to stay.
At one point, when Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) is late for a meeting, Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) mutely rides his motorcycle around him—like a predator encircling their prey in a vortex of dust, until he rides off, having released his pent-up aggression.
“Over time the distance between him and me got smaller,” the mother says of one of her many dreams, in which she recounts to her gay son, who watches her after she falls asleep, lingering on the woman he will leave and possibly never see again, whose nails he paints with polish and introduces his man to, who gives him the answers to his questions.
A picture of Virginia Woolf’s sketch of the form of To the Lighthouse in her notebook.
It’s endearing then, to submit to a film that knows itself, and be bewildered by its mystical properties—people seem to die, but then come back to life. Towards the end of the film, we get a flashback that is not announced as such, so when we flash-forward to the climax we are not sure where we are at first, forced to wake up out of the dream world and face reality. Another remarkable sequence that occurs as a result of Trương’s commitment to his style and form, is when the boys go to get a haircut—and possibly dye their hair green—and to get their ears cleaned out. The salon shares its space with a mechanic, so the sparks from a welding iron look like they’re coming out of Viet’s ear: a coincidence is built before our eyes and stuns us. Edited by Félix Rehm—who was also the editor for Pierre Creton’s A Prince, a subtle masterpiece from 2023—and shot by Son Doan, the film never feels gratuitous or slow, never not beautiful with its cool tones and its 16mm textural grain.
When a white-faced, pink-clad psychic appears and allows ghosts to inhabit her as she finds the gravesites of soldiers, the film enters the realm of the outlandish, the occult. They must exhume the dead soldiers and give them the respect due to them so they can receive closure and move on—even though they’ll never move on, these families with their trembling matriarchs holding framed pictures in their hands, the ones who go to the bank to have cash on hand for the psychic and packs a picnic for everyone to enjoy alongside their irremediable grief.
“How evil can the human soul be,” a woman asks near the end.
At some point you begin to believe the psychic too: what other choice does one have?
When we talk about representation, it seems to be a visual thing: we want to see ourselves, but one thing we chose not to realise is that just because someone looks like you doesn’t mean they are like you within, that they have had your own experience or interior life, because usually the ones that are chosen to represent are those who’ve already lived a privileged life.
Take, for instance, when the boys are asked at dinner by the comrade when they’re getting married, and they pause before they can answer because they are not sure whether he means to each other, but then he clarifies he meant to wives. Or when Nam shares that he sometimes wishes he were a pretty girl, that he wants to be like them when he sees them. Or when Viet brings out a cake for Nam and they come up with a plan about what they will say if someone asks why they are celebrating together and they agree to say they are brothers. Or when your jealousy gets to a point of eruption, and you have to confess your deepest insecurities. These are the sort of social situations that queer people must constantly navigate, that feel true to their experience.
“I feel like a wife waiting for her husband to come back from the war,” Nam says.
It’s interesting to me that Viet and Nam has been banned in its home country due to a “gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view”. For me, the film was so tender and romantic, and any sense of melancholy is part-and-parcel of a queer life: this is how we experience the world, where eros meets dust, present meets past, personal meets political, and beauty is met with bloodshed. There the men are, in the end, at sea, thinking of watermelons at the end of the world, together, like those skeletons discovered in Pompeii—the Two Maidens—doomed yet preserved.
“There are so many things I want to tell you,” he whispers to him.
This is a masterwork on love, dreams, and migration in the wake of the after-effects of war.
Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) and Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) are coalminers in love.
How to cite: Nagendrarajah, Nirris. “The Two Maidens: On Trương Minh Quý’s Viet and Nam.” by Nirris Nagendrarajah.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/29/viet-nam.
Nirris Nagendrarajah (he/him) is a Toronto-based writer whose work has appeared in paloma, Polyester, Fête Chinoise, In the Mood Magazine, Tamil Culture, in addition to Substack. He is currently at work on a novel about waiting. [All contributions by Nirris Nagendrarajah.]
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