Directed by: Hong Khaou
Starring: Henry Golding, Parker Sawyers, David Tran, Molly Harris
Not Rated, 85 minutes
Almost nothing happens in “Monsoon,” which may very well be the point. Nobody says or does anything irrevocable, or even raises their voice. Despite the title, there’s no stormy weather to be found; in the one scene where rain falls, a character opens the door to his balcony, letting in a gentle breeze. Two different characters in two different scenes ask the main character if he’s bored.
Our protagonist, Kit (Henry Golding, “Crazy Rich Asians”), is Vietnamese by birth, but his parents emigrated to England when he was a child, and for the rest of his upbringing made no mention of their homeland, going so far as to forbid him from visiting. Thirty years later, with both parents now dead, Kit returns to Saigon in search of a meaningful place to scatter their ashes. His visit is solemn in purpose, and accordingly his mood is grim, even while he takes up a lover and goes on guided art tours. “I feel like a tourist,” he tells his brother over the phone, but his sightseeing is muted and funereal. He wanders from one spot to another, trying to dredge up any memories of this place that was his home so long ago. The pond where he used to play, the only place he really remembers, has been filled in with concrete.
His journey, to the extent that there is a journey in “Monsoon,” is one of remembrance. Writer-director Hong Khaou (“Lilting”), drawing from his own experiences as a child brought to England from southeast Asia, fills the movie with long silences and widescreen views of plain cityscapes. Kit broods on balconies in Saigon and Hanoi, his ancestral land humming with a language he doesn’t speak and endless streams of scooters that zip through the streets like schools of fish. The movie has a meditative feel, but muddled with a sour note. There’s no magical stimulus that will bring back memories that have faded, Khaou shows us. So life goes on; the present demands our attention.
If only “Monsoon” commanded our attention in the same way. Khaou has a deft hand when it comes to images and music, but no ear for dialogue. What little dialogue there is in this brief movie is largely small talk, interspersed with didactic musings on the legacy of the Vietnam War. When Kit first meets his lover, Lewis (Parker Sawyers, “Southside With You”), at a Saigon bar, they run out of topics of conversation so quickly that Lewis starts talking about local networking events. In another scene, Lewis summarizes the war with the decidedly bland truism “It took a great deal out of us.” Perhaps Khaou is arguing that nobody knows how to speak about the past coherently, but he never forces his characters to try.
The result is a flat movie, with only the gentlest peaks and valleys. Lewis occasionally opens up about his father and about the guilt he feels, as an American, for his country’s occupation; Kit’s tour guide, Linh (Molly Harris, “Doctor Who”), confides that she wants to travel the world, but feels obligated to take over her parents’ lotus tea business; his old family friend Lee (David Tran, “Farewell, Berlin Wall”) expresses unease about the loan he accepted from Kit’s mother many years earlier. There are subtle hints at larger forces in play—systemic racism, economic scarcity, strict cultural traditions—but Khaou is content to leave these unaddressed.
Kit’s seemingly simple task, to find a place to scatter his parents’ ashes, becomes the central thread of the film, a decision fraught with conflicting considerations. This may have been his parents’ homeland, but they were adamant about never returning, so what right does he have to return them against their will? What’s more, the places they knew as home are unrecognizable now, unworthy of the stature of a final resting place. To its credit, “Monsoon” sets up an intriguing contrast between the homes we come from and the homes we make for ourselves, asking whether a sense of home can be regained if ever we lose it. But the movie never articulates the possibilities of this premise. Like its protagonist, “Monsoon” is indecisive, unable to muster up the ambition to venture an answer to its own questions.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/20/20.