Monsoon
Monsoon director, Hong Khaou’s follow up to Lilting carries over some similar themes, specifically in terms of cross-cultural dialogue. With Lilting, it was the coming together of two people from different cultures. With Monsoon, it is the struggle of identity of people who come from a mix of cultures. Henry Golding plays a young British Vietnamese man named Kit who hasn’t been to his country of birth, Vietnam, in several decades. The reason for his visit is to scatter the ashes of his parents who fled the country when Kit was just six years old and sought refuge in England and never returned.
The core of the film focuses on Kit’s struggle to identify as a Vietnamese man despite having been born there. He doesn’t speak the language, his memories of certain places are skewed by a changed landscape and he has forgotten important people of his childhood. Lee (David Tran), a childhood friend of Kit’s, is one example of a distorted memory. Lee’s corrections of Kit’s memories only serve to heighten Kit’s sense of distance and not belonging. It’s a shame that Monsoon doesn’t really follow up this theme in any other way.
The rest of the film follows Kit plodding around the streets and sights of Saigon and Hanoi in a series of vignettes that Khaou attempts to tie into his main theme but, generally, they end up feeling irrelevant. A one-night encounter with a male prostitute may be an attempt to further develop Kit’s character, but feels rudely inserted, especially when Khaou is also attempting to ignite a relationship between Kit and another troubled traveller, Lewis (Parker Sawyers).
A further example sees Kit attending a tea scenting ceremony. It’s a briefly charming scene, but again this only highlights its obscureness. It may be an interesting setting and element to explore, but doesn’t seem to interlink with any of the other moments or scenes. Maybe moments like this would suit another film, but with Khaou only playing with an eighty-minute runtime here, it certainly begins to feel like his idea is stretched thin and thoroughly underdeveloped.
Perhaps the journey would have felt more refined if Golding had stepped up to the plate, but his depiction of Kit shows the character as one who is rather unchallenged. He seems to take everything in his stride and, although he is supposed to be just going along for the ride, a lack of emotion and response dominates most of his travel escapades. If Khaou’s intention was to deliver on this theme of identity struggle, he needed a better performer to capture the nuance.
Monsoon is an empty shell of what it wants to be, featuring a lacklustre lead performance and an abundance of filler. It feels like a waste of a film that may genuinely have had a story to tell.