Coal is the residue of animals and plants burned deep below the earth’s surface for eons. Matter is always in flux. Our bodies decay and absorb into new forms. To see death as finality erases our transience in a vast exchange of molecules. In our dramas of love and loss, it’s both maddening and reassuring to know our departed linger with us in new shapes, stripped of the consciousness we adored in them. Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam is a geological romance reconciling the cavern between the erotic body and the elemental form it assumes in death.
Truong’s filmmaking is languorous and hypnotic. Central image: the tangled bodies of two young, gay coal miners (Thanh Hai Pham and Duy Bao Dinh Dao) circa 2001, backdropped by pitch-black rock. Mine shafts become liminal love lairs. Little specks drift in darkness, rocks sparkling like starlight. Coal dust finds a new erotic potential. There’s no shortage of sensual 16mm images; in a moment of sunlight outside their subterranean world, the two men ride a motorcycle into the sea. They collapse into the water, waves gnashing, the sun on fire. Sometimes Truong’s pontifications and symbolism are inelegant—the two lovers are named Viet and Nam, a blunt gesture towards national identity. But the romance of Truong’s images form a cocoon of raw feeling.
Above ground, modest homes shine from static-y CRT glow. The horn blare and raucous rumble of passing trains disrupt dioramas of quietude. Here, Hoa (Thi Nga Nguyen) lives day-to-day in the shadow of the past. She grows old without her husband, assumed dead decades prior in the war. On a trip towards the Cambodian border, she embarks on quixotic endeavour to uncover his remains. There, she encounters a spiritualist—likely a fraudster—who leads families to the supposed unmarked graves of long-separated loved ones, claiming handfuls of soil are the continuation of once-cherished flesh. Hao struggles with this conclusion. If death is a purely material decomposition, how can she account for the visions of her husbands’ spirit that haunt her family?
Vietnam’s Cinema Department banned Truong’s film for its tapestry of modern Vietnamese history as a cavalcade of tragedies. Indeed, Viet and Nam is about reckoning with absences of loved ones reduced to war casualties or dead migrants. Yet the film eschews pure misery. In the mine shaft abyss, darkness proves twofold—an obscuring sheath concealing the labour of impoverished workers, yet also a shroud from heteronormative judgement, a space of sexual emancipation. Coal overtakes the miners’ bodies. It soots their skin during sex, clogs lungs with its kilos, slowly deafens ears with its built-up residue. Even eyes weaken in the infinitude of mineshaft darkness. As a fossil of past lives, coal leaks the ghosts of long-decomposed animals into their pores: a union with bygone organisms.
The finitude of mortality also haunts David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, another movie about wrestling with a beloved’s decomposition and fending off the rule of matter. “Grief is rotting your teeth,” a dentist remarks to Karsh (Vincent Cassel), in the film’s opening dialogue. The ache of mourning is so palpable it erodes dental bone density. It’s a line so fundamentally Cronenbergian the dentist repeats it again right after.
Karsh is like an even-tempered Poe narrator: a widow buckling with morbid fixations on his dead wife. At one point, he ogles her dental records like they’re Berenice’s teeth. Karsh’s entire entrepreneurial pursuit spawns from loss. Proclaimed a “corpse voyeur”, he’s the founder of GraveTech: high-resolution livestreams (or “shroud cams”) of your loved ones’ decomposing bodies. Technology becomes an asset to perpetuate mourning. Yet when Karsh’s own wife (Diane Kurger)’s grave is vandalized, hacked, and encrypted, he spirals into conspiratorial mania. In The Shrouds, bereaved lovers disavow the conclusiveness of death. GraveTech satiates a need to see the decaying body as still human, to reject the transfer of matter and cling to anthropomorphic forms. Grief is an act of possession, a refusal to relinquish a loved one to a larger ecosystem, to insist on their allegiance to you over matter itself.
Self-reflexivity haunts the film. Cronenberg’s own wife died some years ago, Cassel looks like a Cronenberg doppelgänger, etc. It’s the epitome of late-style, beyond the pop viscera of older Cronenberg. Most scenes elapse without flashy imagery. Instead, we get jargony exchanges over shallow focus shot-reverse-shots in residential homes, interrupted occasionally by sombre body horror. In his old age, Cronenberg seems content to ditch any filmmaking convention that bores him and centre only his predilections. Still, it’s a theoretical exercise told with sardonic wit, never an ounce of self-seriousness.
In Crash, carwrecks were the ultimate fetish object for a disaffected modernity. In this morbid, mass media-era update, conspiracies become fetish objects: an endless rabbit hole of xenophobic paranoias to prolong proximity with the departed. Karsh entertains any crackpot theory he can: the spore-like substance on his wife’s skeleton is a tracking device, Chinese business interest invested in GraveTech is an espionage tool, his wife’s ex-lover-and-doctor (a mysterious Dr. Ekler) is tied to her grave’s vandalism, etc. Conspiracy-play becomes an explicitly sexual act. When he sleeps with his late wife’s sister (Diane Kruger, again), their dirty talk is an exchange of paranoid ramblings. Every character is quick to embrace conspiracy-talk, even Karsh’s personal AI assistant (Diane Kruger, again, again). Conspiracy welds Karsh to new, bereaved sexual partners: new flesh for the old ceremony. Across his womanizing conquest, he breeches promises made to his late wife. Yet her memory grafts onto every woman he sleeps with, mutates their bodies; she lives on in other people.
Viet and Nam and The Shrouds centre uniquely erotic grievings, reckoning with how a body you can fuck can putrefy, become maggot sustenance, disintegrate molecularly, and return to its ecosystem. These films’ characters cannot accept how supple flesh becomes dirt, how an erotic subject becomes one with the lust-less expanse of nature. For Truong’s characters, spirituality hinders the acceptance of a totalizing decomposition. For Cronenberg’s cast of freaks, decomposition isn’t something to negate. Rather, it’s something to render visible, to incorporate into our social sphere. These are deeply romantic films about pursuits (both ontological and political) to redefine the laws of matter, to extend our recognition of the other’s human-ness beyond death, to do everything in our power to refuse love’s end.
