Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's insightful interview with director Minh Quý Trương and some curiosity about the state of Vietnamese film making. There's a huge slate of production company credits so I guess raising means is still a chore. Over two nights due to a failure to enthral.
The focus is on two gay coal miners in an industrial town somewhere Việt Nam in 2001. (I can't find the filming location but am guessing from the director's bio, jungle warfare, etc. that it's somewhere in the Central Highlands, not so far from his hometown of Buôn Ma Thuột. Upon reflection the industrialism, urban scenes and some themes echo parts of The Deer Hunter.) The topics are the traditional ones deployed in Vietnamese films looking for international audiences: war remnants, lingering superstitions, long held secrets and guilt, people smuggling, exotic forms of intimacy, generalised poignant inconsequence. The narrative and characterisation are thin with loads of gesture and little critique or analysis.
Some of the imagery is very striking: the coal seam is shot to look like the night sky, an erstwhile battleground covered with flags (marking UXO or bodies?) and soldiers in frozen poses. This is countervailed by so many distended scenes of percussive banality.
A Critic's Pick by Lisa Kennedy at the New York Times. Her brief review is right to focus on the visual.
