Director – Hong Khaou – 2019 – UK – Cert. 12a – 85m
****1/2
A man who has lived in England for 30 years returns to Saigon and Hanoi to discover the Vietnam his late parents left behind – in cinemas and on Vimeo, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon and elsewhere from Friday, September 25th
Saigon, present-day Vietnam, when bicycles and motorbikes swarm along the roads like purposeful, scurrying ants. Kit (Henry Golding) returns there in an attempt to discover the Saigon and Hanoi of his childhood before his now deceased parents left for England 30 years ago. He checks into the posh area of town, putting the wooden box containing his mother’s ashes on a bare shelf in his sparsely furnished, luxury apartment.
High tech housing blocks give way to the less affluent and more traditional blocks where most urban Vietnamese live. Kit meets with Lee (David Tran), with whom he remembers playing as a child and to whose family Kit’s mother loaned a considerable sum of money to help them start a small business, now a small mobile phone shop. Lee wants to repay the loan to Kit.
Kit goes on an English language tour in an attempt to track down some of the places from his childhood, but so many locations have changed or disappeared. He hooks up with Lewis (Parker Sawyers) who he’s previously contacted via an online gay contact forum and meets Linh (Molly Harris) who together with Sophie (Olivia Hearn) runs an English language art tour in Hanoi. When Kit travels by train to Hanoi, in search of further places from his parents’ past, he takes advantage of Linh’s tour and spends a day with her working in her parents’ lotus tea company before returning to Saigon.
From its lengthy overhead opening shot of Saigon’s road traffic, the film boasts a beautifully measured, almost leisurely pace as Kit’s voyage of cultural discovery and rediscovery takes him from Saigon to Hanoi and back. However, any leisurely feel is undercut by Kit’s need to reconnect with the everyday life of his parents, who got out of the country suddenly for reasons of political persecution.
The visuals have a good feel for the way people lived then and live now – little flats above market shops, pastel-coloured plaster walls, nightclubs and bars where the young congregate, leaving the viewer with a strong and highly distinctive sense of place. Punctuated by images of passenger travel by taxi, motorbike and rail, the narrative emphasises the permanence of some things and the impermanence of others; parts of Hanoi where things haven’t changed much in thirty years at one end of the scale, Kit’s pickups and sometimes fleeting sexual encounters at the other.
No flashbacks are used, the past conjured rather by present day locations which have either remained as they were or changed beyond all recognition and conversations discussing, remembering and unpacking what it was like back then. It’s a slow, moody piece – and altogether highly affecting.
Monsoon is out in cinemas and on Vimeo, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon and elsewhere in the UK on Friday, September 25th.
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