The opening scene of Vietnam and South is splendid. Indeed, it takes place in a setting that is difficult to understand clearly at this stage, but which we will have the opportunity to see again later. On the other hand, we don’t really understand the action that takes place there. So much the better: we tell ourselves that everything will not be given to us right away, here. So, shortly after, we see the two young Vietnamese men as central characters again, kissing each other in a corner of the mine where they work as laborers. And talking about themselves and their life goals. The shot frames them at waist level, and behind them sparkle like stars: we quickly understand then that it is a mine wall, but as it is, this shot takes the viewer elsewhere, into a floating space slightly above realism.
Be careful who gets lost
The rest will not always be of the same ilk. Vietnam and South is a very slow film. The dialogues are exchanged over the course of breaths which take their time. Why not. It is not this choice that keeps one outside of himself and the material that he has to offer. It’s much more of a feeling of being scattered. In terms of substance, the film is indeed extremely ambitious: in addition to being homosexual and hiding this, the two heroes are mentally pursued by the ghosts of members of their family who died during the Vietnam War. And their emigration for a country more prosperous than the Vietnamese society where they live is more or less part of their objectives. It’s not so much, in the end, that these themes are poorly covered: we rather want to deplore the fact that the film takes detours. Perhaps with the aim of letting, in addition, the rural world of the small town of Vietnam that he takes as a setting show itself in his actions and gestures, on the screen, he sometimes allows himself sequences which break the different frames processed. Which still focus on other micro aspects of the major underlying theme mentioned here. Or which, as a bonus, add voices evoking past events and memories, sometimes in a very metaphorical way.
Remarkable medium
Is it because these seemingly superfluous stretches last too long that we end up feeling the attention slip away? Or does it come from their staging? We would rather lean towards the second statement. We get the impression that these sequences are deliberately made more difficult to access than they actually are. It’s a bit as if the signatory of the film showed them to us by affirming, behind the screen, that they are responsible for a host of important issues. Filmed from too far away, but at the same time not showing in a concrete way, they are boring. All the more unfortunate as the feature film includes a series of remarkable sequences where the attention shifts to a non-central character. Namely a medium who searches, via contact with spirits, for buried remains of dead people from the Vietnam War. Absolutely grandiose performer, playing or living the “possession” we don’t know, time taken to observe the reactions of families in search, close-ups on objects sometimes dug up, and preserved, without saying exactly what they are: we are we are passionate, we vibrate, we question ourselves. Director Truong Minh Quy then allows himself a greater variety of shot types. Above all, it really brings together human blocks. Perhaps this is what he forgets in a good part of the footage, leaving the entities he portrays too much in their corner, meditating on their ghosts and their destiny to the point of a form of immobility. .
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Visual: (c) Nour Films
