A dreamy story of queer love and historical trauma

In the opening moments of Truong Minh Quy's third feature film Vietnam and Vietnama slender figure emerges from one corner of the frame and glides towards another. It seems like an apparition, an unreal entity advancing in an enveloping darkness. White flakes float around him, dotting the dark expanse like stars against a night sky. When the shrill ring of a bell interrupts the constructed reverie, a more realistic scene comes into focus: two men hurry to button their shirts and resume work.

Vietnam and VietnamPremiering at Cannes in May in the Un Certain Regard section before showing up at the New York Film Festival this week, it's a dreamy observation of romantic devotion and haunted stories. Its protagonists – Viet, played by Dao Duy Bao Dinh, and Nam, played by Pham Thanh Hai – are lovers whose relationship blossoms in the underground corridors of a mine in northern Vietnam. The first layer of the film revolves around the questions that plague the couple once Nam announces that he will leave the country. We are in the early 2000s, shortly after September 11th, and Nam intends to pay a trafficker to smuggle him out through a container. The news destabilizes Viet, forcing him to deal with what a future without his lover will be like.

Parallel to this harrowing narrative is the existential tale of a nation so besieged by the legacy of war that even the landscape, pockmarked by undetonated bombs, remains a threat. The fact that Quy's feature was banned in Vietnam (hypothetically due to the director's “dark and negative” portrayal of his home country) demonstrates the sensitivity of these still open wounds. Here (The tree house) grounds cerebral questions in historical trauma in the relationship between Nam, his mother Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), his dead father and his father's friend Ba (Le Viet Tung). In exploring how ruptures in the past translate into relationships in the present, he elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates through generations, imposing itself on witnesses and their successors.

The legacy of his father – killed before Nam's birth during the war, somewhere in the country's southern region – haunts Nam's subconscious and his body. The unburied soldier comes to him and his mother in their dreams, and there are moments when Hoa remarks how much his son resembles him. Despite never having seen him, Nam feels driven to understand where and how his father died, and before fleeing Vietnam he embarks on a journey with Hoa, Ba and Viet to find the site of his death. Isn't this how war, or any inherited trauma, affects living spirits? Forcing us to search and exhume?

The strongest sequences in Vietnam and Vietnam present new ways to understand this macabre legacy. They intertwine Nam's relationship with Vietnam with his search for his father, making clear the young man's desire to leave Vietnam even if it means separating himself from this true love. The circular conversations between Nam and his mother reveal the hold the conflict still has on their psyches. In a scene where Nam walks with his family through a wooded area near Cambodia, his father's spirit seems to take possession of him. He becomes the fallen soldier and, piecing together fragments of stories he has heard over the years, imagines his father's final moments in voiceover during a surreal sequence.

The relationship between Vietnam and Vietnam is a kind of dream, realized mainly in the mines where they consummate their love and negotiate their hopes. Working with his cinematographer Son Doan, Quy films these scenes with sincere tenderness. The sensuality of these moments is reminiscent of Payal Kapadia's sex scene Everything we imagine as lightwho was equally adept at capturing the ecstasy of youthful romance with a soft touch.

Hai and Dinh portray their characters with appropriate pathos and moments of subtle humor, and their understated chemistry, as well as a heartbreaking final scene, make one wish Quy would indulge more in how these two relate to each other. The director (with editing by Félix Rehm) frees the plot from linearity and plays with the order of events, which reinforces its meditative quality. But the approach may be difficult for those less inclined to submit to associative trains of thought. Furthermore, the Vietnam-Vietnam relationship, filled with so many surprising moments, seems strangely secondary to the historical unearthing. Much of Vietnam remains a mystery, compared to Vietnam.

While the film suggests there is a degree of interchangeability in the pair – the credits list the characters as “Viet/Nam” and then name both actors – the men are still individual enough to warrant more information. How much does history weigh on Vietnam, regardless of its relationship with Vietnam? Lengthening the film, which runs just over two hours, might have eased that tension. With Quy he achieved something special Vietnam and Vietnam. This is reason enough to stay in his world.