This mysterious and piercingly sad film from Vietnamese film-maker Minh Quy Truong has the air of an extended, lucid dream or realist hallucination. It is a movie about the eternal presence of the dead, which, along with the murmuringly restrained dialogue, makes it comparable to the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
The film’s two key characters unselfconsciously bear names that symbolise the nation. It is 2001, and Viet (Duy Bao Dinh Dao) and Nam (Thanh Hai Pham) are two twentysomething men who were babies when the Vietnam war was concluded. They are coal miners and are in love, often having sex actually down in the mine. These sequences are as bizarre as they are erotic, yet conceivably supposed to be understood on the level of a vision or dream, because the dark coal on which they recline looks like a starlit sky. This could be because the mine is a kind of secular underworld but also because there is surely something uncomfortable and unlikely about sex in these circumstances, as their relationship does perhaps have to kept secret above ground. There is, though, a moment of rare comedy in a line bifurcated with a pause, when they are asked: “When will you two get married … when will you get wives?”
