Monsoon **** (2019, Henry Golding, Parker Sawyers, David Tran, Molly Harris) – Movie Review

Henry Golding gives a tender portrayal of a man trying to reconnect with the place he once called home in Hong Khaou’s poignant meditation on cultural displacement.

Writer-director Hong Khaou’s second feature film Monsoon (2019) gets most of its resonance from its Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City views and from Henry Golding’s subtle, tender, introspective performance as the British Vietnamese man Kit, who returns to Saigon for the first time in 30 years, after fleeing during the Vietnam-American War, to scatter his parents’ ashes.

He meets gay African-American Lewis (Parker Sawyers), for the first time but by design, old family friend Lee (David Tran), whom his mother helped financially years earlier to open his electrical shop, and sympathetic art guide Linh (Molly Harris).

Monsoon is melancholy, thoughtful, sensitive, low-key and warm at heart. As drama, it is undeveloped, unresolved and about half an hour too short at 85 minutes. But, as a film, it keeps a strong hold. There are good characters, good actors and good lines for them to speak. It proceeds as a journey, with lots of appropriate travelling shots, but all the scenes are fragmentary, and, like the film itself, stop well short of when they are done and dusted. True to life, this is frustrating, but compelling anyway. The rarely seen locales are riveting. Henry Golding is immensely watchable. It is all in the eyes. The film is very, very quietly spellbinding.

With more characters, more scenes, more dialogue, more drama, more resolution, this could have been a real contender. Appealing, involving, sometimes moving as it is, it is as frustrating as it is short, so we’ll have to wait for Monsoon 2 to find out what happens to Kit.

Hong Khaou explains: ‘I didn’t want to make it so much about me, although I guess it is inevitable it always comes out. I wanted to hide behind this Vietnamese character, so to speak, and talk about these feelings and issues I’ve always had about having to flee a war-torn country, and the struggle for a sense of cultural identity.’

Like Kit’s family, Hong Khaou’s parents fled South-East Asia when he was young and he too grew up in Britain.

Hong Khaou was born on 22 October 1975 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. His first feature is Lilting (2014).

Monsoon was screened at the London Film Festival on 5 October 2019 and at the 34th edition of BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival at BFI Southbank, and released in the UK on 25 September 2020.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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