OUT ON FILM 2020 REVIEW: Hong Khaou’s MONSOON is a reprieve from the loudness of modern cinema
While watching Hong Khaou’s Monsoon, which screens as part of Out on Film, I felt like I was escaping the constant, wayward buzzing from one to-do list to the next of modern American life, the acidic digits and addictions of social media and Google and “what are the case numbers today?” I felt like I was joining Henry Golding’s Kit on his escape from western society, from his job, from his life back home. That’s a testament to the atmospheric pleasures of director Khaou’s minimalist drama.
About a gay thirtysomething from England returning to his country of birth in Vietnam to find a proper resting place for his parents’ ashes, the film is a quiet, meditative, even entrancing trip down memory lane for one man with complicated feelings about their passing and about his own cultural identity. His mother and father whisked him away during the war when he was a wee child, and he can no longer remember much of anything about this distant place they called home. Refreshingly, there’s no tortured commiserating about his sexuality. This is a man who’s at peace with himself in that regard, on the other side of the coming-out/coming-of-age dance that so many pictures about gay men seem to wallow around in.
Kit is a melancholy person just trying to make sense of that sense of loss and aimlessness an adult feels when they’ve lost both parents. There’s a feeling of having lost your roots, what grounds you to the earth. And the only sensible response to such a feeling is loneliness. Kit is a somewhat lonely man looking for connection in a foreign land, and connection he finds in an American expat named Lewis. He’s a fashion designer attempting to contribute to Saigon’s burgeoning economy, or in Kit’s words “take advantage of cheap labor.” Regardless of their awkward differences, they find a brief kinship in one another.
But Monsoon isn’t primarily about romance or finding human connection. Khaou is more interested in location. Kit is there to rediscover his roots, where he came from, where his parents immigrated from and why. Kit is often framed against the environs of Saigon or Hanoi, Khaou preferring to remind us of the vast gulf between Kit and his homeland, or simply as a reminder of Vietnam’s changing landscape. An emerging cosmopolitan country, the bustling cities and forward-thinking generations of young surprise Kit. He was expecting a place still embroiled in the memories of invasion, and while there is still plenty of that to go around, particularly among the older generations, what he finds there is a country with its eye on the future.
As Kit, Golding delivers his best performance to date. Gone are the rom-com shackles of a Crazy Rich Asians or the thankless buffoonery of his Gentlemen villain. He’s nicely understated here, conveying much with a solemn glance or a quick smile. It’s an appropriately internal performance given the character’s reserved on-screen presence, and Golding tones down his usual natural charisma just enough to fill those shoes accordingly.
What stuck with me beyond themes of cultural identity or expat aimlessness were Khaou’s images, often colorful and symmetrical, emphasizing the spaces around Kit, around Vietnam where new capitalism is fast encroaching on old traditions. There are many words about how fast and how much the country is changing, and you get the impression there’s both good and bad to be had in so much memory being lost to the march of time. More than anything, Monsoon is a reprieve from the loudness of modern cinema. Sometimes silence or stillness is used as a shortcut for thoughtfulness. In Khaou’s film, the silence is deafening.
