The always watchable Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians, Last Christmas) is the placid center of Monsoon, a quiet character study with a deceptively stormy title. Golding plays the contemplative Kit, a British émigré who returns to a reunified Vietnam three or so decades after fleeing the country with his family at age six following the fall of Saigon – renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his absence. Like many who left the besieged country after American troops withdrew, Kit’s parents were reluctant to speak about the war, and he and his brother never pressed them about their pre-expatriate lives in Vietnam.
But with both parents now dead, Kit has finally made the trip back to his birthplace, his mother’s ashes in tow. Looking more like a lost tourist than a native son, he explores vaguely familiar places long dormant in the fog of his memory in a romanticized notion of diasporic reckoning with his cultural past. (His brother, due to arrive later, is bringing their father’s remains.) For the dissimulated Kit, a gay man whose romantic relationships last little longer than the duration of a Grindr hookup, this homecoming also introduces another kind of reckoning, one in which he must consider the possibility of an emotional commitment, courtesy of a supremely confident African-American clothing entrepreneur (Sawyers), a young man whose father was forever traumatized by his military experiences in the Vietnam War.
Cambodian-British filmmaker Khaou evinces a keen sense of geography here, aided by Benjamin Kracun’s cool and enticing cinematography. (The thought of booking a future trip to Vietnam may cross your mind at some point.) A spectacular birds’-eye-view opening shot of Vespa scooters and automobiles scurrying like motor-propelled ants along intersecting boulevards in bustling Ho Chi Minh City evokes an exhilarating sense of modern entropy, while downtown views of nocturnal lights glimmer with lazy rhythms. In contrast, scenes in a less contemporary Hanoi convey an elegant sense of architecture and style, though one rooted in the problematic history of French colonialism. A visit to ancestral family-run operation, where elders scent tea with lotus flowers, is fascinating to watch in its tediousness and yet visually beautiful (Those pinks! And yellows! And greens!).
As Monsoon unhurriedly paces towards an open-ended conclusion, you sense Kit will be in a better place than the one he occupied when he first stepped off the plane. Though some meaningful interaction with his brother might have rounded things out more (the movie shortchanges that relationship completely), you still get the sense that Kit’s inner turmoil (hyperbolically suggested by the title?) will be downgraded to something more manageable after the movie ends. It’s a step in the right direction. Who says you can’t go home again?
Monsoon is available on VOD now.
A version of this review ran as part of our aGLIFF 2020 coverage.
This article appears in November 13 • 2020.