With its focus on character and attention to detail, Monsoon feels like a short story. Set in Vietnam, it follows thirty-something Kit (played by Henry Golding) as he arrives from Europe to settle his parents’ estate. Along the way he is reacquainted with a past he put behind him, and given the chance to form a new relationship.
It’s typical film festival fare: small-scale, resolutely noncommercial, geared toward niche audiences and programmers trying to meet diversity goals. (The movie was supported in part by the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program and BFI’s Film Fund.) Monsoon screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and recently at the Asian American International Film Festival. It opens virtually November 13 at New York City’s Film Forum and other sites.
Henry Golding, of Crazy Rich Asians fame, skews the reception for Hong Khaou’s feature way out of proportion. With a newcomer in the lead, Monsoon wouldn’t receive nearly the same attention, languishing instead in an indie limbo. Instead, Golding’s been profiled for his role here in everything from the South China Morning Post to The New York Times. Either writers are playing catch-up, or succumbing to star-power wattage, because Golding didn’t merit this kind of coverage for his performance in the treacly, sexless Last Christmas.
Sex, especially of the anonymous hit-and-run kind, is a driving theme in Monsoon. Another is how a new generation of Vietnamese is dealing with their fraying ties to the country’s complicated past. The war theoretically ended in 1975, but those just coming of age in the workforce still have to grapple with feuds and conflicts that started well before they were born.
Khaou presents a Ho Chi Minh City that’s bustling with opportunity for some, less promising for others. Kit moves into a posh, fully equipped rental on his arrival. He visits art galleries and restaurants recognizable in any modern-day metropolis. Bars and nightclubs throb with possibility. The trendy, cosmopolitan atmosphere shocked provincial me as much as the new China in Love in the Buff.
Kit makes up new identities on the spur of the moment, like the first-time-visitor he tries out on Lewis (Parker Stevens), an African-American clothes designer. It may be Kit’s coping mechanism as he tries to resolve his relationship with his parents. (Asides show he’s fine with his siblings.) Maybe it’s an attempt to hide his father’s behavior during the war. Maybe it’s an unwillingness to commit to emotional attachments that require something in return.
Whether Kit can open up to such a relationship is a question asked in countless indies. Far more interesting is how Kit responds to revelations about his parents behaved during the war. Dealing with Lee (David Tran), a cousin whose family was left behind highlights the vagaries of luck. A step one way or the other, a pause here or there, and lives are changed out of recognition.
For Kit’s generation, that luck depended to an awful extent on the actions of our country, something Khaou alludes to only in passing. That discretion marks all of Monsoon, a film that succeeds best when it suggests more.
