Movie Breakdown: Monsoon (Noah)

Pre-Screening Stance:

The trailers for this film make it look very ethereal and very pretty and possibly very boring.

Post-Screening Ramble:

Hong Khaou’s Monsoon is one of those indie films where everything is supposed to be found in the silence. The silence between conversations, between set pieces, between two characters just staring into each other’s faces – a heavy blanket of silence that begs to be important. The film, loosely autobiographical, finds Kit (Henry Golding) returning to Vietnam as an adult after fleeing with his parents to London as a child. His mother has died and he’s been tasked with finding a spot to spread her ashes in a country he now knows nothing about. He meets Lewis (Parker Sawyers) and they begin a relationship; he wanders around the country, he sleeps with some dudes, he smokes cigarettes and seems generally confused about what he’s doing and slightly morose that the country he once lived in is now suddenly different … thirty years later. It’s a soft, slow, abjectly gorgeous film (cinematographer Benjamin Kracun gives every moment a quiet, composed distance) so intent on being a soft, slow, abjectly gorgeous film that any deeper meaning gets subsumed into the atmosphere. Henry Golding (of Crazy Rich Asians fame) is a pleasant surprise in this film, his megawatt charisma pulled inward, his star power peeking out from white-toothed smiles and small, pleasant banter with Lewis. But even he can’t give the film the weight it so clearly wants. So instead we stare at the beautiful pictures, and at Golding, and we try to find meaning in a film that might not have any.

One Last Thought:

It feels like this is a throwback to the mid-90s heyday when every film had a floating camera, a brooding cast and no one gave a shit about things like stories or themes.