Monsoon
A monsoon is a terrible storm that can spin your life in new directions. The movie Monsoon is more of a slow-moving front — its impact depends on your level of exposure. If you’re open to it, it can move you, but don’t expect to be blown away.
Set entirely in Vietnam, the film follows the travels of Kit (Henry Golding, Crazy Rich Asians), whose family fled the country for England after the war. There’s so little plot in this 85-minute film that even a brief synopsis would spoil its few revelations. So let’s just say that Kit is gay, meets an attractive African-American man named Lewis (Parker Sawyers), and has a mission that involves finding locations once important to his family.
This is writer-director Hong Khaou’s second feature, after Lilting (2014), and he’s a talented director, which keeps Monsoon visually interesting from the opening drone shot of the chaotic traffic in Ho Chi Minh City. (A measure of Khaou’s skill is that he uses drones sparingly and only when they’ll have maximum impact.) The visual pleasures are important, because as a writer, Khaou tends toward withholding.
There are some lovely set pieces — Kit and an old friend explore a construction site that was once a pond; Kit visits a family who sit in a circle processing lotus blossoms for tea — but dialogue often bends toward the elliptical. Viewers are intended to fill in the blanks as they see fit, which includes extrapolating the meaning of the movie’s finale from inconclusive hints.
(And don’t try to make too much sense of the chronology. Golding is in his early 30s, so if he actually left Vietnam when he was 6, as Kit says he did, it would have been the early 1990s, nearly 20 years after the fall of Saigon. It helps to know that the writer-director is 12 years older, and that his family escaped Cambodia in the mid 1970s.)
Kit is an inexpressive fellow, so Golding gives an appropriately subdued performance. As Lewis, Sawyers is more openly engaging and likable. In small but vital roles, Molly Harris and David Tran add important emotional counterpoints to Kit’s apparent inertia.
It’s easy to say that Monsoon is about one man’s effort to find his place in the world, or that it makes an interesting companion film to Da 5 Bloods in exploring the continuing impact of the Vietnam War on both Americans and the Vietnamese. But Khaou doesn’t want to limit viewers’ reactions with conclusive plot twists or a dominant point of view. His Monsoon draws you in but leaves you to find your own way out.
Grade: B. Not rated but not recommended for children or younger teens. Available to rent via grailmoviehouse.com
(Photo: Strand Releasing)
