The first shot we see of Henry Golding as Kit in “Monsoon” is instructive. Kit sits in the backseat of a car as he makes his way from the airport to a hotel in Saigon. He gazes out the window in a look that feels tinged with something like fascination, something like longing with an undercurrent of ambivalence. In a later scene, Kit goes out to the balcony of his hotel room after a few days of acclimating to the country. That same wistful gaze returns as the camera slowly pans out, dwarfing him amidst the architecture of the city. Throughout “Monsoon”, Benjamin Kracun’s camera returns to Henry Golding’s face. For long stretches of the film, Kit is silent – gazing around at his surroundings, and in those moments those silent glances say enough about the complicated feelings of identity and uncertainty that define the quietness of the film.
“Monsoon” does not end with the emotional crescendo that we might anticipate from a film of its kind. Hong Khaou’s tender drama, which he writes and directs, tracks the experiences of Kit, a young British Vietnamese man who returns to his birth country after 30 years. His return is both an act of reclamation and an act of searching as he tries to make sense of this place that he no longer identifies. Ostensibly, Kit is there to find a place to lay the ashes of his parents, who have been dead for some years. He will scope out a proper location in this country he does not know, before his brother arrives with his family and children for a proper spreading of the ashes.
Even as the search for a place for the ashes marks the closest thing to a focused plot in “Monsoon”, Khaou is fairly explicit about his interest in the reticent character observation of a man trying to piece together the identify of himself, and his parents. It is a character observation rather than character study because Khaou’s narrative technique over the course of “Monsoon” privileges emotional distance as an aesthetic and thematic preoccupation. It’s a well-earned choice in a film that reflects the emotional displacement of the emigrant returning to his birth place, even if Khaou’s concerns are more complicated than just a familiar ‘you can’t go home again’ theme.
In establishing Kit and his family, as part of the group of emigrants from Vietnam during the Vietnam War, Khaou is able to deftly examine the residual grief and pain for Vietnamese in the decades after the war. Earlier this year, Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” offered a potent examination of the ways that Black-American soldiers live with the ghost of the war. “Monsoon”, although not explicitly centred on the war, offers a rare and empathetic glimpse at the struggles of the Vietnamese, so often rendered as secondary figures in a war that tore apart their country. Kit is a stranger in Vietnam. As he wanders the streets, his longing gaze intact, Khaou needs to give him no dialogue for us to understand his painful inability to feel at home – or to even understand.
Kit will meet three key figures that offer contrasts to his own struggle. The most emotionally affecting are his meetings with his childhood friend Lee – played excellently by David Tran. Whereas Kit’s family made their way out of Vietnam, Lee’s family was not as lucky. In an early scene, Kit visits Lee and his mother. He sits politely, but awkwardly, in the kitchen – he cannot speak a word of Vietnamese, even as Lee can speak English. His well-meaning gift of a water-filter lands with a thud, as he realises – moments too late – the implications of the gift. It’s a small moment, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it wince from Kit that defines much of the complications in “Monsoon”. Moments of great clarity do not come with much fanfare; instead the information we do learn comes incrementally and in waves of quietness, almost as if they are incidental. In a later moment with Lee, Kit learns of a different version of his family history that complicates his memory of his parents. Golding’s muted reaction of bafflement is a sharp indictment of Kit’s own emotional blankness.
Even though Khaou never explicates it, the film gently suggests that Kit is not handling his grief well. His human interactions, but for a phone call with his nephews, feel too reticent. Beyond Lee, Khaou provides another Vietnamese contrast in the form of Linh (Molly Harris), an art curator in Hanoi whose family have a tea-scenting business. In one of the prettiest sequences of the film, Kit sits with the family for a scenting session – the images are idyllic, but the emotions are less so. And we realise, as he explains to Linh’s family how his parents chose England as their destination rather than other more popular alternatives, that his emotional reticence is the sign of a man yearning to be found.
It’s that desire to be found that provides “Monsoon” with its second major arc – as Kit sorts through his feelings of displacement, the closest thing to an ally in strange Vietnam is Lewis, another visitor to the country. The two men meet in a fairly awkward first-date early in the film that seems like only a perfunctory prelude to sex, but as “Monsoon” deepens, it adds depth to Lewis, an American whose father fought in the Vietnam War. Like Kit, he too is in Vietnam trying to uncover parental baggage. Khaou presents the romance between the two men as a compassionate exploration of two men yearning for comfort, giving the two moments of emotional resonance in unexpected places. Golding plays excellently opposite Parker Sawyers’ Lewis, adding an element of boyish anxiousness that recontextualises his familial grief into something that resembles a mild identity crisis.
“Monsoon” ends with two wordless sequences. For eight minutes, we watch Kit greeting his brother and then an extended sequence with Lewis. With no dialogue, the camera pulls out and we watch Kit seeming to slowly come to something like understanding and peace with his place in Vietnam. In a way, the lack of words seems unusual. There’s no incisive line of dialogue to sum up the journey, or to decisively mark his future. But the restlessness of the things that are unspoken fits with Khaou’s focus here. When “Monsoon” ends, it is not with a bang. Instead, it gently looks ahead at the possibility of something like peace, as Kit forges an identity for himself even amidst the uncertainties of not-quite-belonging. The subtlety of Khaou’s gentleness in “Monsoon” is charming.
Monsoon is available for streaming iTunes ahead of a DVD release in November.