Quán Kỳ Nam is a cozy, languorous film that might elude some viewers who don’t have the patience to sit around sipping on tea while waiting for hoa quỳnh to blossom. Still, just like waiting for those petals to unfurl, if you manage to sit still until the end, the result is a tender beauty whose scent will linger on even after the flower is gone.
At Saigoneer, we have published quite a number of collections featuring old photos of Saigon, but my personal favorites are always the works of Japanese photographer Doi Kuro. In the 1990s, Doi traveled across the length of Vietnam, hitting all the iconic tourist towns and capturing street scenes on his film camera. The results are vibrant, lively, candid, saturated shots that encapsulate everything I love about the rhythms of life in the country.
Memories of 1980s Saigon in technicolor
Watching Quán Kỳ Nam feels a lot like a perusing a flipbook animation of Doi’s images, it’s a joy to see the characters on the streets interact with the rich universe in popping colors. The film is director Leon Quang Le’s second after Song Lang (2018), with a script penned by Leon and veteran writer Nguyễn Thị Minh Ngọc. The plot follows Khang (Liên Bỉnh Phát), a translator from Đà Lạt who moves into an old tenement in 1980s Saigon while working on a new Vietnamese-language version of the French classic Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). His life in the apartment block starts intersecting with its many residents, including Kỳ Nam (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến), a widow with a complicated past who runs a kitchen providing monthly meals to locals.
Despite major developments in visual effects and production design, Vietnam’s cinema industry in the past decade remains hampered by weak scripts, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Quán Kỳ Nam is an uncommon outlier excelling in both. The plot is rather uneventful and mainly spends time fleshing out the dynamics and relationships between the tenement’s inhabitants, but what the film might lack in adrenaline, it more than makes up for in a level of intentionality and nuance that’s rarely seen in local productions.
Quán Kỳ Nam’s intentionality shines through in the way it meticulously tries to depict Saigon not merely as a backdrop, but a living entity that exists whether the main characters are there or not. In the film’s Saigon ecosystem, secondhand electronic collectors roam tenement corridors and belt out their unique street calls, rustic coffee vendors dole out cà phê đá in plastic bags, and cinema-goers bemoan Soviet flicks being interrupted by reel delivery delays, and more! The version of retro Saigon in Quán Kỳ Nam is perhaps the most faithfully and obsessively recreated to date, having brought to life with surgical precision.
Interior details of Luyến (left) and Hạo (right)'s homes.
There are about a dozen of characters in the ensemble cast, but no one feels gratuitous or one-dimensional; they come to life with clear motives, backgrounds, and personality quirks that will quickly endear them to viewers. The three breakout stars are Luyến (Ngô Hồng Ngọc), a coquettish tailor who relocated from the north to Saigon with her brother; Su (Trần Thế Mạnh), a biracial teenager helping out Kỳ Nam at her kitchen while struggling with being bullied for having a white father; and Hạo (Lê Văn Thân), an elderly traditional medicine practitioner with a penchant for bird-keeping and then-scandalous bolero music.
Bà Bằng (left) and Su (right) are fantastic additions to the tenement's crop of characters.
In Leon and Ngọc’s script, everybody speaks with an accent and cadence fitting of their regional and social background, and uses phrases that don’t stray far from the kind of natural banters one might eavesdrop in Chợ Lớn. Even though they are built from existing archetypes, each supporting character is well-written and -acted, breathing life to a vivid vintage Saigon diorama that, at times, can even outshine the main leads.
An old-fashioned, life-enduring genre of courtship
The central emotional anchor of Quán Kỳ Nam is the budding romantic tension between Khang and Kỳ Nam, who are both good people played by excellent actors, but admittedly a little boring to watch. Kỳ Nam marks Đỗ Thị Hải Yến’s return to cinema after 10 years, and she has once again demonstrated a sterling ability to communicate entire stories with just a glance. Kỳ Nam might seem perpetually melancholy and reserved, but viewers will eventually discover the many tragic layers underneath that sadness, all maneuvered with aplomb by Yến.
Liên Bỉnh Phát’s performance as the mild-mannered and bookish Khang is serviceable at best, but it’s not his fault that he wasn’t given much to work with, not to mention that he’s just a smidgen too in shape to play a 1980s translator convincingly — don’t tell me that those forearms were the result of typewriter usage. Apart from a love for literature and a seemingly bottomless reserve of altruism, Khang appears one-note when compared with the building’s very memorable other tenants. The only thing that saves Khang from dissolving into the plaster walls is his brotherly friendship with Su. Their interactions bring a lot of depth to both Khang and Su and are heart-warming to see.
Even as I’m writing this review, I am still at war with myself on whether Khang and Kỳ Nam’s lack of chemistry is a feature or a bug. When put into the context of 1980s Vietnam, their relationship seems star-crossed in every sense of the word except literal as it’s severely hampered by political and social taboos: Khang hails from a long line of revolutionist government workers while Kỳ Nam married a military officer of the previous regime; Khang is a single young man, and in the cruel eyes of 1980s Vietnam’s society, Kỳ Nam is essentially “damaged goods” as a widow; not to mention the huge age gap between them.
After Kỳ Nam injures her wrist, Khang insists on helping out with cooking. This draws them closer together.
In spite of every hindering circumstance, they share an astounding level of intellectual chemistry and are compatible in both life philosophy and treatment of people. Kỳ Nam’s childhood in a French-language school allows her to immediately appreciate the translation work that Khang is undertaking, and he gets her Albert Camus reference right away. His core value as a person is sympathy and kindness, qualities that she also demonstrates when she sneakily helps the mice in mousetraps escape the tenement’s ruthless hunt. Besides, over the course of the film, Kỳ Nam, Khang, and Su form a found family over the kitchen’s daily operations, giving us a feverish glimpse into a fictional future when they all make a home together.
This makes Khang and Kỳ Nam’s lukewarm romantic chemistry a little disappointing, because I was so rooting for them to… just do something. There are meaningful glances, unsaid confessions, and even a non-sexual all-nighter, but they mostly seem uneasy and guarded. Their interactions are understandably chaste in public because of the numerous social constraints of the society at the time, but even in private, the pair is surprisingly demure. This awkwardness culminates in a peck on the lips behind closed doors that feels, to me, like watching your aunt and uncle kiss. Liên Bỉnh Phát had better chemistry with Isaac in Song Lang, and their characters don’t even kiss.
The couple's courtship might seem tame for today's standards, but is typical of the time period they live in.
And yet, seeing Kỳ Nam and Khang’s romance unfold on screen reminds me a lot of the courtship of my parents’ generation, a time when a passing glance or platonic lunch together could inspire decades of handwritten letters and a lifetime of yearning. The kind of love composers penned songs about and writers reference in novels, like Hiền and Vọi in Khái Hưng’s Trống Mái or Trịnh Công Sơn’s love letters to Dao Ánh. I wonder if I’ve been too desensitized by my generation’s liberal and rather blasé attitude towards romance that I’m lambasting their soulful, intellectually attuned connection for being too restrained. The bottom line is you can decide for yourself whether you can resonate with their love story, if you manage to catch the film when it’s still in theater, which, I suspect, won’t be long.
An instant classic of contemporary Vietnamese cinema
Quán Kỳ Nam’s straightforward storyline will be easy to grasp for just about any viewer, but as a whole, it is not a film for everybody. Contemplating and reminiscing are not activities the average Vietnamese viewer today is dying to do during a movie-going experience, but if you have lived through the period of Saigon’s growing pains depicted on screen, the film is a heartfelt tribute to a version of our lives that we perhaps are not yearning to relive, but nonetheless, hold a lot of affection for. Additionally, you will be able to appreciate the film more if you come with some basic knowledge of Saigon’s modern history, which, I would argue, is necessary to understand the actions and emotions of the characters — why Su is mercilessly picked on by the kids over his American parentage, and his own path to reunion; why Kỳ Nam’s family situation inspired much malicious gossips; and the diverse ethnic and social dynamics of the tenement.
Every background in the movie is crafted with great attention to details.
Ultimately, to enjoy Quán Kỳ Nam, you must be at peace with slowness. The film unapologetically celebrates and rewards patience, from placing a slow-burning romance at its heart to featuring many activities that famously take a lot of time: translating a book, making pork floss, and, my favorite, watching the nocturnal hoa quỳnh bloom in the evening. I knew from the moment I stepped out of the cineplex that Quán Kỳ Nam would perform poorly at the box office — it is objectively a great film, but it only seeks the appreciative eyes of a specific few.
All told, I am not too sad over the Quán Kỳ Nam’s imminent departure from local cineplexes, because I fully believe that the film will find its own audience in due time via other platforms, as an instant classic in the collective works of contemporary Vietnamese cinema. Saigon and our lives might drastically change every decade, but these snapshots of the past remain untainted, as does our fondness for them.
Photos via Facebook page Quán Kỳ Nam.
