A masterful and poignant reflection on self-identity, queerness and migration…
Questions of identity, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality and colonialism are nothing if not a recurring theme in cultural conversations in the last few years – a hot-button topic that keeps resurfacing in film and TV, beloved of commentators, columnists and critics. But the discussions on these topics are so often limited by a lack of imagination or of nuance. Films that deal with these questions often tend to deal with them in a head-on way, plastering The Importance Of This Theme everywhere, reducing human behaviour to cyphers of opinion.
Monsoon is not necessarily a film about LGBT+ characters, but about identities – sexual, national, racial. Its protagonist is a gay man – Kit (Henry Golding) – who visits his Vietnam homeland to scatter his parents’ ashes (the family had to leave in the ‘80s out of fear of Communist reprisals). Having lost his grip on the language, Kit struggles to find a solid footing, spending his time in anonymous hotel rooms – split between being a tourist and a native, simultaneously both and neither. He visits his childhood friend Lee (David Tran), but connection is somewhat awkward and strange, the distance of years allowing personalities to drift apart.
Meanwhile, Kit starts a tentative romance with Lewis (Parker Sawyers). Lewis’s father was drafted into the Vietnam War, and like so many drafted Black men were forced to fight and come back to a country that didn’t want him, a fact exacerbated by racial inequality – a fact that Lewis is still dealing with deep into adulthood. Lewis is sheepish about his Americanness – Kit challenges him when Lewis states the war was nothing to be proud of (“why would you be proud of any war?”). As a fashion designer coming to Vietnam to set up a factory line for his clothes, there is also the question of whether he is exploiting cheap Vietnamese labour for profit at home. And although he defends himself by suggesting he is investing in Vietnam’s developing economy, the film allows Lewis to doubt himself – the typically American braggadocio undercut with humility and self-doubt. Parker Sawyers brings a great deal of balance to a difficult and interior role that has no easy answers for his character. Both Lewis and Kit come with the benefits afforded to them by being reasonably rich Westerners, albeit shaped by prejudices enacted on them back home. They also come to Vietnam with insecurity – neither expects to ‘find themselves’, as a million trite films would have them do.
Hong Khaou’s second feature comes five years after his first, Lilting, an exquisitely poignant drama which starred Ben Whishaw as a gay man mourning the death of his partner and trying to communicate to said partner’s Chinese mother. Five years is, frankly, too long for such a talent to make another film, but the gestation period has clearly paid off in Monsoon, which is a stunning, complex, uneasy investigation of individual identity.
Indeed, there are no easy answers throughout Monsoon. Kit asks himself a lot of questions about who he is, and what the Vietnam he is visiting represents. This is a stylish, hyper-modern Vietnam, of sleek glass-fronted galleries and towering skyscrapers, although one where poverty still thrives and people live in shacks tucked away across the river. The country may still have a Communist government, but the same problems of inequality and poverty still linger in the background. Ho Chi Minh City – or Saigon as everybody still calls it in Monsoon – is just like any other major city, with the same shopping brands, the same languages spoken in the café, the same apps on your mobile. Another recent film made by a diasporic director – Take Me Somewhere Nice by Ena Sendijarević, about a Dutch-raised teenage girl returning to Bosnia – made the exact same comment about Sarajevo.
This is clearly a tricky film for Khaou himself; Cambodian-born, his parent fled to Vietnam after the fall of Phnomn Penh, and then again they moved to the UK in the ‘80s, and there’s no doubt about the autobiographical elements of the film. But his direction of the film is so confident, so relaxed that it never loses focus. Henry Golding, comfortably in the A-list off the back of the success of Crazy Rich Asians and Last Christmas last year, has already shown his capabilities in both romance and comedy, but here he truly elevates his game. He may have oceans of charisma to lean on, but this is an exceptionally tricky performance, precisely because it is so interior. Kit is too shy of a character to ask himself questions out loud about his identity as both a gay man and as part of the diaspora – but Golding allows all of those questions to linger in his eyes, lovingly shot by Khaou’s camera.
Speaking of the camera, this film is a reflectophile’s dream. Appropriately enough for a film about self-identity, Khaou and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun layer the film with reflection after reflection, aided by Saigon’s high-rises. Some shots pan across two or three separate layers of reflection – a world lit up my the blue LED screens of smartphones and laptops, connecting us to friends on the other side of the planet, but equally a world pushing us further and further inside, into nondescript air-conditioned hotel rooms, where we stare at our reflections in the window, backed by the city lights.
Monsoon constantly swirls back to the same essential question for Kit – what is home? He visits the pond in which he and Lee used to play. It is now filled in with concrete. He just about remembers the old market. On another day, he visits a family-run lotus tea plant, and joins in with them, physically preparing the lotus tea – a practice fast-fading in favour of cheap, industrially-processed packaging. All elements of the ‘old’ Vietnam. The new one has white-cube galleries, craft beer and gently Americanised accents. Is either Vietnam more real than the other? He wants to return his parents ashes to their homeland – but what is their homeland anymore? It’s impossible to say. And the impossibility of knowing that weighs heavily on Kit’s mind, as it surely weighs heavily on Khaou’s mind too. There is something deeply ‘outsider’ about Kit and Khaou’s perspective, unbound by the simplistic binary notions we tend to give to our conceptualisation of identity. But they are not maverick rebels. Rather, there just doesn’t seem to be an easy place for them to sit in the world.
Monsoon is released in the UK and Irish cinemas and on Digital from 25 September 2020 by Peccadillo Pictures.
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