Late 20th-century Vietnamese history casts a trancelike spell across Truong Minh Quy ‘s “ Viet and Nam ,” a thickly shadowed exploration – or should that be excavation? — of national trauma and its habit of living on, in spectral form, through subsequent generations. 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. Perhaps Truong does not mean us to watch “Viet and Nam” so much as he wants us doze and dream our way in and out of it.
It is 2001 and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) and Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) — never distinctly identified as such within the film and given a joint “Nam/Viet” credit in the closing scroll — are two young coalminers in rural Vietnam involved in a tender but illicit relationship. Deep underground, in the sepulchral privacy of a nook carved out from the mine walls, they make love and cradle each other as anthracite sparkles around them like starlight. Son Doan’s subterranean, homesick, black-and-blue cinematography can be so shadowy as to be all but impenetrable, but sometimes out of the murk emerge frames of breathtaking loveliness.
Nam is intending to smuggle himself out of Vietnam, taking a perilous route involv.
