Monsoon (2020)

Film: Monsoon (2020)

Stars: Henry Golding, Parker Sawyers, David Tran

Director: Hong Khaou

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We continue our two-week long (daily) look at 2020 films with a movie that might've slipped by you if you weren't paying attention.  I have lived in the Twin Cities for most of my adult life, and so I know the theater patterns of this area very well, and Monsoon is the sort of picture that would sneak into the Landmark Theaters for a one-week engagement in August, and then adios out...the kind of movie I'd try to see on a Thursday evening before it left forever.  But I'm not going to close out the year without seeing a film where Henry Golding makes out with a bunch of men (that's...something I want to be a part of).  Monsoon, though, is less-concerned with titillation and more with trying to explain the emigrant experience, and how we can never really understand our parents.

(Spoilers Ahead) Monsoon is the story of Kit (Golding), a young British-Vietnamese man who goes back to Vietnam (where he was born) for the first time in thirty years.  He is doing so to scatter the ashes of his late parents, with whom he fled the country when he was six.  While there, Kit starts up a romantic relationship with Lewis (Sawyers), an American who is in the country as a nod to his father, who is a Vietnam war veteran.  While there, they seek an understanding of their parents, the experience of those who fled Vietnam (and those that stayed), and see if there's something meaningful behind their vacation romance.

There's not a lot to this movie, which at 85 minutes is very short.  The picture is introspective, and even with its main characters, isn't all-that-interested in giving us much of their lives.  Golding as a performer continues to be an unknown to me.  He certainly looks like a movie star, with his impossibly handsome face (I texted a friend during one scene where Kit is essentially on a Grindr-like app, and wondered "what kind of heart attack do you have if a guy that looks like Henry Golding pops up on your grid?"), but the part feels underplayed, which is what the script is calling for but I feel that Golding's work is too muted.  There's not enough there for an arch for Kit, and Lewis isn't a big enough character for him to take some of the focus.  Arguably the best attribute of the film is Molly Harris in a small part as Linh, a young woman who doesn't want to go into the family tea business (she works at a museum), but it's not so much rebellion as it is indifference.  Most films about generational differences rely on "a new way of thinking" but that implies that the old way was wrong-Linh is apathetic to the old way, and I found that a sharp observation.

Overall, though, the film goes nowhere, and is shockingly chaste for a picture where a man repeatedly has anonymous sex with strangers (I don't think there's any actual nudity in the film despite at least two sex scenes).  The ending feels unearned, and while it does have elements that could've worked well (the changing shots of a city between decay & gentrification make a better statement than anything in the script), there's not enough there.  It's also worth noting that the sound mixing is dreadful, like Tenet-level bad.  I had to turn on subtitles for key scenes (despite them being in English) because the background noise & score was too loud.  This is a persistent problem for 2020 films, and I'm begging directors-we always want to hear the actors, and you can find other ways to underline that it might be hard for the characters to hear each other than also making it hard for us to hear them.