Trong lòng đất
****/****
starring Phạm Thanh Hải, Đào Duy Bảo Định, Nguyễn Thị Nga, Lê Viết Tụng
written and directed by Trương Minh Quý
by Walter Chaw They find one another in the earth and the pitch black more by instinct, I think, than by feeling. Like animals born in the dark and orienting themselves towards heat. We are all born in the dark, guided by need and the mysterious vicissitudes of subterranean rivers and tides. Because Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a love story, it’s first about lovers meeting and then about how their identities flow into each other like mercury, in constant flux and only ever itself. When Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) are twined together, there’s a memory of wholeness they represent–a solidity their country has never really enjoyed, annexed and colonized as it has been since its inception. They are a memory of something that never was, a dream of completion. In the credits, they’re listed as “Viet/Nam,” and over the days we spend with them, they try to uproot themselves from the trauma and division of the ground that grew them. But disconnecting yourself from the place that is your history and culture is like learning to fly by lifting yourself in defiance of gravity.
Nam’s mother Hoa (Thi Nga Nguyen), in particular, is tethered to her small square of mud and grass. She’s stuck in place, almost literally. If you squint, you can see the circles she’s worn pacing the circumference of her tiny home. Like a person broken by the lack of opportunity to surpass the limitations into which she was born; a person broken by grief and made tunnel-visioned because of the black veil of it. She’s moored by poverty on the one hand, unable to leave a country that has nothing for her but the weight of a collective past, and on the other hand, she feels she can’t abandon her husband, who was killed in the waning days of the Vietnam War, his body never recovered. She dreams about him, lost and trying to make his way home like the ghoul from a W.W. Jacobs chiller in fantasy sequences that loom over the film’s already-tenuous reality. I was reminded a few times of Bob Clark’s Deathdream in terms of a certain complementary murkiness in texture and tone. A spirit medium (Khanh Ngan) offers to exorcize these demon revenants, these unrestful casualties of colonial corruption. She claims to be possessed by them (she is possessed by them–they are all possessed by them); her face contorts into a rictus of pain and outrage, and she stares at the one villager who dares laugh at her pretensions until he lowers his eyes. She leads them into the fields and the forests that surround them, plunging her hand into the rich, pitch-black soil and pulling out clots she names as bits and pieces of the beloved: here a hand or a wisp of hair, there the skull with cheeks once touched by a dear one’s kisses.
That’s the beautiful thanatopsis of Viet and Nam. The grotesquerie of it, too, held in decaying tension like a tripwire rusted and made unsound by its time brooding in the jungle. What is a claymore that has forgotten its target? Truong makes clear that this breathtaking landscape is still littered with the detritus of weapons of impersonal mutilation: a message in a bottle packed with malignancy as the only aim for connection. I think of the sentient suicide dolls in Philip K. Dick’s “Second Variety,” consummating their incredible love for you explosively, intimately, mortally. Nam tells his mother he is in love. He says that for him and Viet to have a future together, they must leave, and she gives him her blessing in the way that she’s able. Nam and Viet talk about the rest of their lives like young lovers do. They speak plans into the hollows of the other person’s body as they float against the black of the mine, speckled with mineral glints that make it seem as though they’re swimming in an ocean of ink or the sky itself, the men in a weightless embrace like twins in the womb they share. The only other time I’ve seen the topography of skin filmed quite like this–filthy, streaked with sweat and grit, essential and erotic–is in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes. It lands with the same effect in both, imparting an atavistic, chthonic power to an act as innate, as mechanical and biological, as sex, showing how people, in their desire to be more than beasts, invent tenderness and a soul that is independent of meat and bone.
A “slow” movie is one that invites introspection and has the patience to allow its audience to remember, in their own time, the truths they’re encouraged to forget. As Viet and Nam find doomed passage across the limitless sea in a storage container bound for a lie of civilization, they fantasize not about their forever together but about their next meal, or maybe a drink of water. Behind them, Hoa’s home floods as she tries to move her things above the water line for a while before collapsing into a corner. She calls out for her son, but her son is gone. She is freed from her husband’s ghost, and the price was only the world swallowing her former prison with her still inside. Drowning is a strange way to die. It’s the process of taking in what is in the process of taking you in until there is only a cruel, invasive insistence on equilibrium left in its wake. I have heard that after the initial convulsions, the drowner experiences a moment of peace before expiring. I have also heard that finding balance is the goal; perhaps this is proof, if that’s true. Viet and Nam have nowhere to go and nowhere to return to. And yet there remains the ambition, the labour, of love, when things are so dark you can’t see your lover’s face in front of you, when you can feel his breath mixing with yours, and the soft sandpaper of cat’s tongues on your body as you dance together in repudiation of disintegration into the calamitous night.
