雨季来临前

Sophomore feature from Cambodian-born British filmmaker Hong Khaou, like LILTING (2014), MONSOON continues his interest in genderqueer characters, Henry Golding plays Kit, a 36-year-old British Vietnamese returns to his fatherland for the first time after 30 years, his family fled Vietnam (as the “boat refuge”) for fear of persecution during the civil unrest, and left Kit’s childhood friend, Lee’s family behind. Now bringing his parents’ ashes to rest, Kit tentatively starts to familiarize with the place, the country he barely recognizes, along with developing a romantic relationship with an American designer Lewis (Sawyers, who notably plays a young Barrack Obama in Richard Tanne’s SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU, 2016), whose father was a soldier in the Vietnam War.

Unable to speak his mother tongue, and the reunion with an adult Lee (Tran) never exceeds the formal propriety, and a mutual guardedness is palpable, Kit is stuck in a double consciousness because to Lee, he is a foreigner, a westerner; but to Lewis, his pigmentation denotes that he is still a Vietnamese. And their tentative discussion about the damned war proclaims that the scar is still in both psyches, albeit neither of them are actual participants.

MONSOON, for what it is worth, is a minimalistic cinematic prose about transiting, Kit is constantly seen on the move whether in Saigon or Hanoi (provenance of his parentage), by scooters or on a train, contemplating everything that flows in front of his eyes. In his drab service apartment, or a restaurant with a view, his eyes wander towards the landscape or cityscape, that he knows he must acculturate, yet there are missing pieces there, sustained by Golding’s faintly stressed aloofness and an innocuous air of ordinariness, the overwhelming sense of displacement gels mildly if none too spectacularly,

Also, Khaou’s introspective politesse, a style he masters more effectively in LILTING, manages to find extraordinaries among the pedestrian milieu, like the rigid opening God’s-eye view on the crisscrossing vehicles, or the lotus tea cottage industry, Khaou's nimble touches of beauty and transience are in bloom, but overall, the script is wafer-thin to undergird a feature-length project, as if MONSOON closes up shop right in the calmness before the storm, it flavor is too insipid to leave an indelible mark for aftertaste, and incidentally, casting two handsome heterosexual men to play gay lovers is almost regressive where out actors are thick on the ground whose career need a boost the most.

referential entries: Hong Khaou’s LILTING (2014, 7.0/10); Lucio Casto’s END OF CENTURY (2019, 7.8/10).