Việt and Nam and the queering of consciousness

Trương Minh Quý’s “Việt and Nam“ (2024), which can be watched on Dailymotion, concludes with a gloomy scene, where the two titular characters are slowly suffocated in a large trailer during an attempt to be smuggled into England as unregistered workers. The dark interior of the trailer, where Việt and Nam sit with their bodies dirtied, recalls their life underground as miners in northern Vietnam — a humid, unlit scenario that, despite the physical distance, mirrors the same impoverished, humiliated life that appears to be inescapable.

Illustration of Viet and Nam by Trần Minh Hiếu (@heewiewie)

Throughout the movie, “Việt and Nam“ remain so strikingly similar that we cannot tell one from the other. They wear similar clothes. They have similar haircuts. Even when their dialects differ, we cannot pinpoint exactly who is Việt and who is Nam. The credits never clearly distinguish who plays whom. Việt and Nam, as both a movie and as characters, plays on that mythological fear of — and longing for — the othered kin. The film never accepts a conventional self-other discourse: one moment, you can be a heroic veteran searching for the remains of your close comrade; the next, you can be the pathetic person desperately hiding the guilt of accidentally pulling the trigger that killed your friend.

The uncanny strangeness of seeing the worst within ourselves is representative of the post-war Vietnamese psyche. Despite our best efforts, multitudes of worlds — socialism and capitalism, liberalism and conservatism, First World and Third World — simultaneously exist. The quest for a “true“ past, metaphorically told through the journey to find the remains of Việt and Nam’s father, is meaningless — for the past is dead. The father cannot speak for himself; he is forever frozen in the gaze of the present-day us, without a chance to say more.

Việt and Nam is one of those films that, through its insistence on alternative lived experiences, helps illuminate society’s margins. Trương Minh Quý’s project has a daring vision: the Vietnamese public is still relatively conservative about queer representation, and the film’s unconventional exploration of war and impoverishment directly challenges nationalistic, “meritocratic“ propaganda. As a result, it should come as no surprise when the government decides not to “endorse“ or “distribute“ the movie — effectively revoking its Vietnamese “citizenship.“ In effect, the film itself becomes the Other to its kin’s self — so similar yet so different, so familiar yet so alien(ated).

However, this is only a facticity on which Việt and Nam transcend. Their intimacy is embodied yet almost alienated from the gloomy context — a time in which homosexuality is still banned by the government, in a place of impoverished, forgotten lives. They have sex on the cold mountain of black coal. They lick the blood from sexual intercourse. They even eat each other’s earwax. How can one enjoy such a degree of freedom and love when everything seems to work against basic human decency? Queer joy and love, specifically in racialized bodies, is Trương Minh Quý’s solution. It is in the interactions between impossible bodies — bodies that transcend our borders — that we take one step closer to justice. To honour our war-torn past, love — difficult, challenging, queering love that defies categories — is the most viable answer.

Trương Minh Quý’s work, despite its mournful end (inspired by a true event), stubbornly holds on to joy, love and freedom as a means to liberate ourselves from the chains of the past. Queering love, then, holds the ultimate possibility not only for the Vietnamese people but also for racialized, impoverished communities worldwide.

Khang-“Ninh“ Đang (he/they) – or Đang Khang Ninh – is a queer Saigonese in progress. Primarily practising poetry, they also write about queer social justice, gender disparities and critiques of the political economy.