Monsoon (2019)

Although this film is credited as being from 2019, it wasn’t released until last fall, and it appeared on Netflix recently, where I finally got the chance to see it. I remember hearing about it a ways back and being interested in it, so I’m glad it’s available now.

Kit was a child when he left Vietnam, escaping with his mother and brother at the end of the war and settling in England. Now a fully grown Englishman, Kit returns to his native country after the death of his mother, meeting up with old family members and trying to find the home he used to have.

This is a very common immigrant narrative, and it seems especially so for Asians living in the west: the idea of coming “home” to a country you don’t quite fit into anymore. But for all its familiarity, the story is told with a simple, spare poignancy. Kit feels like a tourist wherever he goes, he’s lost most of his Vietnamese, and nothing looks like it did in his few family photos. Enough time has gone by that the memories he holds of Vietnam are more his mother’s than his own, and he squints to try and make the country feel like he thinks it ought to.

The film is incredibly indie, in that it’s very quiet, fairly meandering, and more than a little wistful. It creates its sense of mood well, and Kit’s lonely, rudderless feeling comes through the screen clearly. It takes full advantage of its setting, artfully depicting everything from the frenetic buzz of the city traffic to the soft stillness of the local tea makers following their generations-old practice. The supporting characters drift in and out of Kit’s story, touching and affecting him even as he presses forward in his quest largely alone. The story doesn’t answer many of the questions that it asks, and while I don’t know that I’d necessarily call the ending satisfying, I understand where it flows from and feel its place within the narrative.

One thing I appreciate is that Kit is gay. It’s definitely a factor in the story, with him beginning a tentative romance with an American in Saigon, but being gay isn’t what Kit’s story is “about.” I’ve said this before, but we don’t see nearly enough of that in movies, films like Happy Together or Can You Ever Forgive Me? where the main characters’ queerness is an acknowledged, important facet of their lives but doesn’t form the driving conflict of the piece. LGBTQ folks do a lot more than come out, combat homophobia, or face HIV/AIDS, but the overwhelming majority of LGBTQ-themed movies fall along those lines. I love stories where a character doesn’t “have” to be LGBTQ but is anyway.

Warnings

Thematic elements, brief sexual content, drinking/smoking, and language.