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‘Viet and Nam’ Review: History Is a Shallow Grave in a Plaintive, Penumbral Queer Romance
Two gay miners in love face ghosts of the past and portents of the future in Truong Minh Quy's drowsily distinctive second feature "Viet and Nam."
Given its edge of radical newness from its frank, grimily beautiful portrayal of gay lovemaking (seldom have the body-contouring properties of coal dust on sweat-slicked skin been more sensuously explored), the rhythms of Truong’s film are still slow, and the curtains-drawn darkness of much of its 16mm imagery may also induce a state of meandering, semi-directed sleepiness. And Nam’s party encounters another group, who have engaged the services of a psychic (Khanh Ngan) in white face paint and a pink silk robe, who may be a charlatan but claims, un-disprovably, that the clumps of clay she claws out of the ground are in fact the sought-after man’s flesh, “turned into black dirt.” Truong’s approach is ostensibly similar to that of Thai master Apichtpong Weerasethakul and of last year’s Vietnamese Camera d’Or winner “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” But while those touchpoints achieve a kind of transcendent lightness, “Viet and Nam” is constantly pulled down at the edges, made heavy with foreboding and waterlogged with generational sorrow.
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