Truong Minh Quy’s third feature, which premiered at Cannes and is banned in his home country of Vietnam, artfully maps a heartbreaking romance onto the battered history of a nation.

In the opening moments of Truong Minh Quy’s third feature Viet and Nam, a svelte figure emerges from one corner of the frame and glides to another. He seems like an apparition, an unreal entity wading through an enveloping blackness. White flakes float around him, dotting the dark expanse like stars against a night sky. When the shrill whine of a bell interrupts the constructed reverie, a more realistic scene comes into focus: Two men rush to button up their shirts and resume their work. 

Running parallel to this heartbreaking narrative is the existential tale of a nation so besieged by the legacy of war that even the landscape, pocked with undetonated bombs, remains a threat. That Quy’s feature has been banned in Vietnam (speculatively because of the director’s “dark and negative” portrayal of his home country) speaks to the sensitivity of these still open wounds. Quy (The Tree House) grounds cerebral questions of historical trauma in the relationship between Nam, his mother Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), his dead father and his father’s friend Ba (Le Viet Tung). In exploring how the ruptures of the past map themselves onto relationships in the present, he elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates throughout generations, imposing on witnesses and their successors.

The strongest sequences in Viet and Nam present new ways to understand this grisly inheritance. They braid Nam’s relationship to Viet with his search for his father, clarifying the younger man’s desire to leave Vietnam even if it means separating from this true love. Circular conversations between Nam and his mother reveal the hold that the conflict still has on their psyche. In a scene in which Nam traverses a forested area near Cambodia with his family, the spirit of his father seems to seize him. He becomes the fallen soldier and, piecing together fragments of stories he’s heard over the years, imagines his father’s final moments in voiceover during a surreal sequence.

Viet and Nam’s relationship is its own kind of dream, carried out mostly in the mines where they consummate their love and negotiate their hopes. Working with his cinematographer Son Doan, Quy films these scenes with a frank tenderness. The sensuousness of these moments recall the sex scene in Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, which was similarly adept at capturing the ecstasy of youthful romance with a soft touch.

Hai and Dinh portray their characters with appropriate pathos and moments of subtle humor, and their understated chemistry, as well as a wrenching final scene, makes one wish that Quy indulged more in how these two relate to each other. The director (with editing by Félix Rehm) liberates the plot from linearity and plays with the order of events, which bolsters its meditative quality. But the approach might be a struggle for those less inclined to submit to associative trains of thoughts. It also makes the relationship between Viet and Nam, filled with so many striking moments, feel oddly secondary to the historical disinterment. So much of Viet remains a mystery, as compared to Nam.