Henry Khaou’s Arresting Portrait of Unease
It’s hard to discern a memory you haven’t had. Recognition is a scarce commodity throughout Kit’s (Henry Golding) return to his birthplace, Ho Chi Minh City, in Monsoon. This pilgrimage is the first time he’s returned since his parents fled the war’s aftermath for Britain when he was six. The city he knew as Saigon has undergone rapid change and is now a modern metropolis. It’s easy to share Kit’s befuddled perspective of the colorful, contemporary Vietnam. It’s rare that we see the country portrayed outside of depictions of the troubled conflict born from its rift; a fissure that would spread to the home of its occupying force. Kit is also subject to the transformation time has wrought on his memories. “If I see you in the street, I cannot recognize you,” said his childhood friend Lee (David Tran). Kit struggles to connect to a home that is unfamiliar, not just in landscape but in language. He is constantly in need of a translator; reduced to the limited amount of phrases one would expect from a western tourist.
What is a home you can’t identify? Hong Khaou asks this and other perplexing questions of identity in his second feature. Monsoon is a quiet, ponderous portrait of unease; filmed on the cusp of Golding’s slingshot to superstardom (during filming he casually shared with his co-star, Parker Sawyers, the trailer for a recent movie he had shot, Crazy, Rich Asians). Khaou had been working on the script for years. After his first feature, Lilting, played at the Sundance FIlm Festival, he received a grant from the festival to develop Monsoon. Similar to Kit, Khaou fled his home country of Cambodia when he was eight. Khaou cites the unrest in the U.K. over Brexit and the accompanying anti-immigrant sentiment as one of the film’s raisons d’être. He felt compelled to put a human face to the complexities that are often inextricable from an immigrant’s story.
Kit finds solace and zeal in Lewis (Sawyers), an American, whom he meets on a dating app. Kit is able to find a morsel of the comfort of recognition with Lewis. “You look like your picture, thank God,” he says at a Saigon club playing a rendition of “I Know What Boys Like” by The Waitresses. Lewis goes on to share his affection for the singer’s choice to keep her accent. “It’s what makes the song,” he says complimenting the artist’s display of character. A demure Kit obscures his true reasons for visiting before taking Lewis back to his hotel room for a passionate tryst. Sex is one of the few activities in which Kit finds comfort and displays vivaciousness.
There is magnetism between Kit and Lewis that is best on display in scenes without dialogue; when they are either sharing a quiet moment or pressed up against a wall, indulging in their desire for each other. Lines in Khaou’s script are like the blades in a friend’s knife block; some sharp and pierce quickly, others are dull, flat and disappointing. The polarizing nature of the scripted exchanges is all the more glaring because there are so few of them. The sparse discourse is buoyed by the engrossing eye of cinematographer Benjamin Kracun. Kracun and Khaou capture the kineticism of twenty-first century Hanoi and Saigon. The shots are long and loving; encouraging studied gazes that would result in disappointment at the implied head-turn of too early a cut.
Kit and Lewis connect on more than just a romantic level; both men’s lives were deeply impacted by the war. Lewis’s father fought in Vietnam and recently committed suicide. The Army did nothing to care for him when he returned home. Kit reveals he has returned to spread his parent’s ashes. Kit’s extended absence from VIetnam is due in large part to his parents, who forbade him and his brother to return. His fruitless search for the appropriate place to lay his parents to rest is the apex of his distress. The anxious irony of Kit’s search is summed up by Lee, his childhood friend, “They went through so much to leave here. And now you bring them back.”
