Paul Thomas Anderson | One Battle After Another / 2025

intentional revolutionaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (screenplay, based on Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, and director) One Battle After Another / 2025

 

As critic David Denby recently observed in The New Yorker there are two kind of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, the “big noisy” movies, ragged epic studies of human behavior such as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, and “smaller, quieter ones” such as Phantom Thread and The Master, although it is difficult to think of the later film as either small or quiet. I argue that there is also a third kind of Anderson work, the highly political, comical, and linguistically disjunctive movies such as Inherent Vice and now One Battle After Another, both broadly based on works by Thomas Pynchon and which are neither truly quiet nor big, noisy, and ragged epic works, and I would argue represent least flowed contributions to cinematic art.

     Both of the films of the latter category, highly popular with critics, the most recent work of last year (2025) actually becoming a box-office hit, have become almost cult works given the fact that they present as semi-heroic characters, stereotypical figures of politically radical behavior that one might argue are generally unpopular with a great portion of the general public. Certainly, times have changed. It would have been almost unimaginable to experience a film like One Battle After Another in the early 1970s at the time when the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst, who soon after joined them in their bank robberies and other assaults. Since then, however, given several horrific presidential administrations, so many of us have come to distrust authority for its racist, homophobic, socially irresponsible, and financially greedy self-aggrandizement, let alone its patriarchal obsession of the female body, that what once might have been seen as political criminals to the vast majority of society are now so celebrated that they are not only seen by a certain sliver of the US population of improbable heroes but whose cinematic exploits are celebrated as a likely Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

     The irony, given that we live now under an almost dictatorial government which we the people elected, is almost beyond explanation. Is the Hollywood establishment and its liberal-minded followers so isolated from the rest of the good ‘ole USA that it can now manage to get almost as rich as the right wing businessmen for satirically showing up their heartless, narrow-minded greediness? Apparently so.

     Welcome to a world where the villain of the piece, Steven J. Lockjaw (a wonderful Sean Penn), a corrupt military officer pursing the radical French 75 underground members, who is also so obsessed with the sexual lure of black women and who later virulently denies unspoken suggestions that he might be homosexual, is almost as much fun to watch as the powerful radical leftist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Lady Champagne (more commonly known later as Deandra) (Regina Hall), and the Perfidia’s rather lost white boyfriend, the explosive device expert, “Ghetto” Paul Calhoun nicknamed “Rocketman” (Leonardo DiCaprio), along with their interracial gang who free entire immigrant detention camp detainees, rob banks, and blow up strategic imperialist enterprises.

     Strangely despite all the busy activities of the French 75 group and the attacks upon them by the corrupt police and military members, unlike Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent—which also celebrates political dissidents, but which is almost entirely dependent upon a complex manipulation of incidents of the plot—there is virtually no “plot” in Anderson’s film, merely, as it’s title suggests, one battle after another, one car chase followed by the next.

    By the time most of the French 75 group have been rounded up and killed off, and the pregnant Perfidia has escaped the public “protection” of Lockjaw and returned to Pat, what remains of the radical movement has gone so underground that it functions almost entirely through codes and paranoia,* setting up the surviving couple, Calhoun and Perfidia, in an underground safety house in Baktan Cross, California—not so different from Dona Sebastiana’s safety house in Recife, Brazil in Mendonça Filho’s film.

   Here Perfidia bears a daughter and, just as quickly, refuses to perform the feminine role of motherhood, abandoning Pat and would-be family life for Mexico, Algiers, or some other exotic spot, leaving behind what will soon become, now under the name of Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary with a growing pot of a stomach and too much pot and cocaine in his brain washed

down with wine and whisky. But one has to give him credit, if nothing else, for raising a fiercely independent, beautiful daughter Charlene, newly named Willa (Chase Infiniti) whose friends, in another US cultural shift to which this film gives voice, all identify as non-binary, suggesting that Willa herself does not see herself locked in a female-male dichotomy against which her mother so struggled. Welcome Donald Trump to the real world.

    Yet out there somewhere Lockjaw still lurks, and now, 16 years later, seeking entry into the exclusive evil old men’s strictly secret segregationist Christmas Adventurers Club. And suddenly remembering that there is a black girl out there who probably is his baby, decides to declare war on Baktan Cross, calling in the military to close down the local chicken processing plant where dozens of illegal aliens are employed and other liberal intuitions of the town, while secretly seeking to capture Bob and Willa for extermination.

    Hearing through the underground of the attack, the former Lady Champagne (now Deandra) is deployed to whisk Willa away from a school dance and hurry her off to nearby convent of pot-growing nuns.

     Bob/Pat, whose brain has shed almost all ties with the radical underground, cannot remember the code word to be given the location of his daughter’s whereabouts. Escaping through an underground tunnel, Bob rushes off to Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), the local karate sensei and community leader who also houses many of the town’s immigrants—who he sends off through a hidden passage—and his own students, who take flight with Bob across several rooftops, from where he falls before being arrested by the local police. They interview him, insisting he is a diabetic in need of insulin, and transfer him to a local hospital where a nurse suggests he enter the next room to take the nearby fire escape to safety.

     Meanwhile, Christmas Adventurers Club member, Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker) is called to the Club and told of Lockjaw’s activities, including the closure of the chicken processing plant owned by one of their own members. Miller is sent to do away with Lockjaw, Bob, and Willa.

     Accordingly, we now have a trio of confused and desperate men on their way to the convent.

   Predictably, Lockjaw reaches the destination first, capturing Willa and, in a truly painful comic moment, forcing her to undergo a DNA test to see if she is truly his child. If the machines aligns with three straight markers, her future will be death, otherwise she will be freed. He proves he is the biological father and now must rid himself of his evidence, his own daughter.

     Arriving just in time to see his daughter taken away by Lockjaw, after his hired murderer Avanti  refuses to kill the girl because of her young age. With Avanti at the wheel, he drives Willa to a far-right militia who will do the job.

     Yet, as Avanti sees the men meet in preparation, he refuses to drive off but returns with gun in hand, killing them all, as Willa escapes in his car.

 

     Following Lockjaw, whom Miller is chasing, Ben witnesses what appears to be Lockjaw’s murder, finding the car and body in a small gully. But also remembering another car speeding past him going in the other direction, turns back to find Willa herself, after killing Miller, afraid even to meet up with her own father without the proper code. He begs her to stand down, which she finally does, collapsing into his arms in relief as they return home.

     Lockjaw, miraculously does survive, and is greeted at the Christmas Adventurer’s Club as a new member. Shown into his new office, Lockjaw sits back in utter joy behind the desk, as the doors as closed and gas becomes to fill the room for a ceiling vent. Once he is dead, a person comes to carry him off for cremation—a series of events that perhaps all too vividly call up the Nazi gas chambers and cremation plants.

     Before I close, however, perhaps I need return to the missing link in all this, the “rat” as Willa herself describes her mother when she discovers the truth, Perfidia Beverly Hills, whose sexual relationship with Lockjaw is at the heart of later father-daughter dilemma and near-murder. Some critics felt strongly that the character was, as Wikipedia describes it, “was overly sexualized and a sex criminal.” Yet describing Perfidia was herself being overly sexy, or as one commentator put it, horny, entirely misses the point. Yes, she is fetishized by Lockjaw, but she begins their relationship by putting a gun to his head and demanding he get an erection that she refuses to put to rest. She uses him in an almost sadist-masochistic manner to keep him from overtaking her, from turning her into a black whore of a slave.

     Throughout the early part of the film, this central character, prepared at any moment to be raped by the men in power, attempts to convert their attempts at over-powering her to regain her own empowerment until finally, faced with complete defeat and years in prison, she once again is able to use her sexuality as a device of escape.

      Even when she is freed, however, she must still face a heteronormative and patriarchal demand, that she convert her political energy and activities to motherhood. Her refusal to even play that role speaks to the integrity of her position, whether or not one agrees with her choices. As the actress playing the role, Teyana Taylor herself argues, her character weaponizes her sexuality against her enemies, explaining that the decisions Perfidia makes through the film are done out of her struggle to survive:

 

“It will never be a moment of judgment, because a lot of her mistakes have come from her being in survival mode dealing with postpartum depression and the title of being a strong woman—a strong Black woman. We don't get the same amount of compassion as everybody else. We don't get the same amount of grace as everybody else. Everybody just assumes we're okay.”

 

    By taking gender out of the picture, her daughter Charlene/Willa opens up new possibilities of a non-binary identification that might permit her to survive not simply as a woman, but as a human being worthy of survival in the fact she represents herself primarily not in terms of sex.

    It is not coincidental that the Trump Republicans began their attack on the LGBTQ world, a world that lies generally outside of their patriarchal hierarchical constructs, by attacking transgender figures, not only because they are a small, underrepresented minority, but because their very transformation symbolizes the collapse of their system, in which a fluctuating sense of sexuality no longer permits them steadfast control. The fact that a woman can become a man, a man a woman threatens their very notion of a permanent, inflexible reality. Who knows who you might wake up to be?

    Finally, I believe we should perceive Perfidia as a remarkable escape artist, a Houdini of sexual definition. A radical beyond all the political issues of this film.

    And it is little wonder that there have been attacks of Anderson’s film from right-wing commentators that see it as a sympathetic portrayal of volent anti-fascist revolutionaries. I joked at the beginning of this essay that the work was ironic given the Democratic / Republican gap of our times. Yet the concerns of this film are not all established as “left-wing” activities, even though members not only of the political right but the left have seemed to support this reading. The issues brought up in this film, however, just as in The Secret Agent, are about battling authoritarianism, fascism itself, which should be an American concern, not simply one a liberal political party. The entire establishment of our country was based on these very principles, and we see in the Brazilian film just what happens to individual liberties when they are taken away. This satire seemingly exaggerates them to outright murder, but then the histories of authoritarian and fascist governments have almost always taken away life along with the hard-fought liberties.

    As I wrote of Mendonça Filho’s motion picture: “The film was written for our times.”  

 

*Codes and coding are particularly important in this film, the former becoming so impregnable that they keep out the very people the codes were created to protect. Oddly enough, many years ago in 1993, without having read Pynchon’s 1990 fiction, I wrote a prose poem titled “Existentialism” about the French underground using just such an elaborate coding system that they finally couldn’t communicate. I do not like to intrude with my own creative writing on these essays, but I do think it quite relevant to this work:

 

“There was a moment in which anything might have, should, did occur to us as potentially an act that carried with it risk, danger, and yes, we understood, destruction of all we had known, knew, and would know as something to be cherished, loved. Yes, we were cautious, crossing streets forward and back again, and darting into establishments which we had never visited before, out a side door into an alleyway and over a wall or through little lanes at back to those streets again where we might walk calmly or furtively and quickly cross. Still we were certain to be seen, followed, felt the eyes upon our back, turned entering another house of flats, and sat, perhaps, on the little leather settee for a time before we tried a door at the back and took to the streets once more. Then we might return home or stop by a bar for Pernod, sitting all afternoon at an obvious table, or sometimes hidden, racing out of the place and posing as prostitutes do by the loo on Rue St. Germain or into a hotel where we would try to rent a room. Sometimes we saw them pass, so we thought, and double back, and passing us once more, becoming alarmed that we might recognize them, change women or men, so that the first follower might fall away to be replaced ty the second who might be the clerk who asked how long we intended to stay. So we said very little, were non-committal, were so uncertain of our plans, even if we dared to be seen in one another’s company, we could not make dates, could not declare, for certain, if we would be at such and such a place on a particular week or day. So it, we, the organization we had in courage and faith begun, began, had begun actually before we felt each footstep was a cause for fear, a trace to be followed to our houses, children, spouses, to fall apart. For if one of us found his or her way into a place where another of us might have met her or him, he or she was probably not around. If we did meet, it was by chance, an accident, as when I met Paul on the pier, one afternoon, Pierre met my mother at the marketplace. But even here, at the marketplace or pier we were so afraid to speak to one another, to say anything others might overhear, that we concocted a code, quite complex, of rhymes, numbers, and associations the might hide what we really said. For example, if I met a man who was once one of us—for we could no longer trust everyone who once joined was serving yet—I might say “Hello, Mr. Jello,” which meant, “Are you trembling, in trouble, nervous, upset? If he said “Good day Mr. Marshmallow,” I would quickly turn about and leave the place; while if he reproved with a “Harsh fellow” I might speak a little lower, supposing we were being watched. If, on the other hand, he addressed me as “Mr. Bellow,” I might assume I could shout, and in a natural voice answer him, “Well, Sir, what about the Bastille then?” If he responded, “It’s been liberated,” we might meet—by accident again—in another blank—depending upon the number of letters in the word—months, weeks, or days. If, on the other hand, he told me it was a prison, I could presume that he or she was being tailed so continuously that he or she would have to hole up for a period commensurate, I might never see her or him again. So I might respond, “Adieu,” or “Auf Wiedersehen” or “So long, to indicate the movements of the Americans, the Germans, or the French. And he or she might respond, I do or don’t like lager, beer, wine, or whiskey, depending upon the nationality with which she or he did or didn’t have contact.

     Consequently, we did little for the underground effort and against the government had no effect.”

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).   

 

 

Kleber Mendonça Filho | O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) / 2025

unintentional revolutionaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

 (screenwriter and director) O Agente Secreto (The Secret Agent) / 2025

 

By far one of the very best films, if not the best of 2025 was Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Although Kleber Mendonça Filho cited a slew of films as influence, including John Boorman's Point Blank (1967), Karel Kachyňa's The Ear (1970), Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna's Iracema (1974), Héctor Babenco's Lúcio Flávio (1977), Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Eduardo Coutinho's Twenty Years Later (1984), to me the film closest in style and impact is Costa-Gavras’ 1969 movie Z, a political thriller like The Secret Agent that has far more real human political consequences than the science fiction fantasy world of Close Encounters or Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), which threads a path through Mendonça Filho’s work through our hero, Armando Solimões’ (Wagner Moura) life. His young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes) is fascinated by the imagery of the poster; and events surrounding a shark discovered with a human leg in its mouth, weave their way through a journalistic trope about the murder and harassment of gay men enjoying sex in a local public park.

    The time is 1977, in the midst of the Brazilian military dictatorship when the government is run more like a mafia that controls through murder and threats. Armando, a former university researcher who as chair of his department has openly offended the former Eletrobras executive director Henrique Ghirotti who has come to close down his active research department, planning to pick of various faculty members for his own organization and to delete any possible forms of competition. He is a brutally rude individual who, the night before his meeting with the faculty, at a dinner party offends Armando and his wife Fátima Nascimento (Alice Carvalho), who is a teacher, by referring to her as his secretary and treating her as if she were chattel. Before the evening is over, she speaks out vehemently against Ghirotti’s behavior and the night ends with the usually unaggressive Armando slugging out the executive.

     Fatima, Armando’s wife dies soon after, presumably of pneumonia; but we wouldn’t be surprised if she were, like Armando, quickly put on a government hit list and killed

     The film begins, in fact, with Armando running for his life in an attempt to reach a revolutionary safe house in Recife (the city at the center of nearly all of Mendonça Filho’s films). A simple stop to get gas in a rural outpost, demonstrates the brutal world of the day. A dead man lay rotting at some distance from the station, the police having refused to even pick up the body since it’s carnival time. And yet policemen are sent out to investigate the driver of Armando’s yellow Volkswagen. Although they can find nothing wrong, the police still demand a bribe. Since he has just paid out his last Real, he offers them an almost empty pack of cigarettes instead and drives away, the body remaining in place with the gas attendant having to chase off packs of wild dogs.

     We are, as the written narrative reports—in a vast understatement—in a time of mischief.

    Armando arrives none too soon to the underground hideaway, a sort of boarding house filled with people whose lives are threatened, run by a former designated “arnarcho-communist” Dona Sebastiana (the wonderful Tânia Maria). The “refugees” in her safe house include a married couple of Angolan Civil War refugees,Thereza Vitória and Antonio (Isabél Zuaa and Licínio Januário), a single woman with whom Armando has sex, Claudia (Hermila Guedes), a young gay boy Clóvis (Robson Andrade) who helps Dona Sebastiana with household chores, and others. Perhaps the major difference between a work like Z and this movie is that in Costa-Gavras’ work most of the central figures are, in fact, politically involved in in an overthrow of the government, while these individuals have simply been named as Communist and threats because of often minor and even sexual grievances.

     To protect his identity, Armando’s name has been changed to Marcelo Alves. An entire film might have been made focusing simply on these remarkably frightened but brave individuals, all unique human beings worth more attention than this movie has to give them. And their one group meeting when several admit their real names and the Angolan couple give away their secret about fleeing soon to Sweden, is one of the most moving scenes in the film.

     But the pleasure of The Secret Agent is its vast scope of seemingly unrelated events, some of which we at first can only comprehend as incidental scenes, that make the film seem almost like a dream never to be fully understood until the pieces begin locking into place to make a coherent image a bit like an extraordinarily large picture puzzle. Even the incidents I have so far revealed are expressed in his essay far more coherently that they are in the movie where we have to connect fragments of conversations and scenes cut out of the chronological pattern of the whole.

    For example, why does the film suddenly cut to the Department of Oceanography, where the have just discovered a tiger shark with a human leg inside its mouth. And why are the corrupt Civil Police chief Euclides and his sons Sergio and Arlindo among the first at the sight, desperate to close down the news of the incident before the newspapers get word of it?  Eventually, we learn that the leg belongs to an individual who was probably killed by the police, the body tossed into the Capibaribe River.

     The sons are later instructed to steal the leg and toss it back into the dark waters, which becomes the subject of later newspaper sensationalist folklore when it supposedly attacks the gay men and female prostitutes openly engaging  in sex in the local park, killing numerous of them. The strange story of the “hairy leg” is based on real incidents in the late 1970s, according to Globo.com, written about in the Pernambuco Daily (Diário de Pernambuco) which allowed the press to disguise censored news about police violence, corruption, and homophobia that took place in the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. Daily reports of the return of “the hairy leg” revealed bodies and sometimes names of victims who might otherwise have gone unrecognized.

     We soon also discover that also in Recife live Armando/Marcelo’s father-in-law, Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) and his wife’s mother who are looking after our hero's young son Fernando, whom Armando hopes to take with him when he escapes. It is the boy who is fixated on the film Jaws even though Armando and Sr. Alexandre, who works as a projectionist at the city’s major art film theater the Cinema São Luiz, do not think that the dream-ridden boy should be subjected to given violent images that the film presents. But as we later discover at the end of this work, once his grandfather actually allows him to see the film, his nightmares come to an end. The truth (at least as presented in art) is obviously the solvent to many of our internal fears, a theme that is also explored throughout this movie.

     Meanwhile, the underground group of Recife arrange for Armando/Marcelo to be employed in the Institute for Identification where he often gets an upfront seat on police investigations and where he can peruse the archives to find more information about his mother, who was evidently married by his father when she was a 14-year old servant, an example of the racial inequalities that still exist in Brazil today and are often referenced in Mendonça Filho’s films.

    From the beginning Police Chief Euclides, probably simply to keep a close eye on him, offers Marcelo his protection, insisting he join him and his son on a visit to a local tailor Hans (Udo Kier in his last cinema role) who, because he speaks German, Euclides is convinced must have been a German war soldier, forcing him, despite Hans’ retreat to a back room, to show him his scarred legs and chest as he and his sons laugh; in actually, as Armando/Marcelo perceives, Hans is a German Jew who has suffered in the camps during the Holocaust. Our hero, accordingly, gets a clear view of just how ugly and bigoted Recife’s city police have become.

     Another theme in this director’s works of cinema is the split in cultures between southern Brazil where sit the major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and the north where Recife and other major cities are located. The urban coastal south, the center of Brazilian culture and industry, looks down at the more agriculturally dependent north, another theme played out in this and other works by the same director.

     So it is with a sense of slight fracture that the film suddenly presents us with a scene in São Paulo where the vengeful now former Eletrobras executive Ghirotti calls on two guns for hire, Augusto Borba (Roney Villela) and his nephew Bobbi (Gabriel Leone). Ghirotti wants Armando/Marcelo not only killed but with a hole in his mouth, obviously a punishment for his speaking out against his dissolution of the important research group of Pernambuco.

    After a scene of a brutal murder they have committed, the body of which they also dispose of into a river, we are quickly returned to Recife where in a secret meeting at the Cinema São Luiz, Armando/Marcelo meets up with one of the leaders of the underground group, Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) who asks him to tape his history, particularly the scene with Ghirotti, and sadly must tell Armando that he is now on a death list and must leave as soon as possible; but since his own passport will reveal his identity, he must wait for 4 more days for a forged document.

     Suddenly, with horrific speed, the formerly slow-moving film tumbles into a series of quick events as Augusto and Bobbi arrive in Recife and hire a local gunman Vilmar (Kaiony Venâncio) to track down Armando/Marcelo and carry out the brutal vendetta.

     It is in these last scenes of the film where Armando finally lets himself be momentarily swept up by the Carnival that has been going on through most of the film, and during which hundreds of people have been murdered, many of them by the police themselves, as we have already witnessed in the “hairy leg murders” tales.

     It is in this context that our hero also meets up with his fellow “refugees,” the group basically saying goodbye to one another, with Dona Sebastiana recalling her early days in Italy when she first became a kind of "unintentional revolutionary."

     Vilmar, through bribes of the second projectionist at the famed art theater is able to track down Sr. Alexandre, and through a letter he has left in his office desk, the current address of Armando, whom he finally tracks down to the Institute for Identification where he now pretends to work.

     Vilmar, moreover, is being tracked by Bobbi, just to make certain that he accomplishes the task.

When Armando spots Vilmar at his offices, he finally is forced to take up the offer of protection Police Chief Euclides, who, despite is own murderous actions, appears to be suspicious of the visit of Southern hitmen such as Augusto and Bobbi, whom they quite literally take “for a ride,” making it clear that they are not appreciated in Recife, and probably behind the reason the two have hired a local to actually commit the act.

    Armando demands Euclides protect him, having witnessed, he argues, a man harassing others in his office. Euclides sends his son Arlindo and another “soldier,” to checkout Vilmar. The moment they confront them, he shoots them both several times, killing Arlindo, the other wounding Vilmar before he too dies in the street, a police car quickly arriving to scoop up their bodies, two more men having died mysterious deaths whose cause will never be revealed.

     Bobbi, still on Vilmar’s track follows the trail of his blood to a barbershop, which when he enters he discovers to be empty. From behind Vilmar shoots him dead, before he escapes.

     Certainly, this is perhaps almost too much plot to even assimilate, but necessary, I argue, to explain fully what this thriller is all about. 

    Throughout, moreover, there have been two other scenes that seem almost inexplicable until, once again, the events are interlinked with the larger plot. Two women are listening to tapes—the ones we have earlier seen Elza record in Cinema São Luiz while interviewing Armando. These woman, who soon discern, exist in the present day, are transcribing the tapes of the underground during the dictatorship. One in particular, Lenira Nascimento (Aline Marta Maia) is deeply moved by Armando’s voice and his story about his encounters with Ghirotti, whose horrific acts have turned his normal life into a hell.

     Even here, however, we learn that the tapes are now being recalled back to headquarters since they have been discovered perhaps to contain sensitive information. Was this, we can only ask, in the days Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023), calling back all attempts to actually discover past truths like the current US president, Donald Trump?

     No matter, Lenira has secretly recorded the tapes, herself becoming part of an underground of information. She makes an appointment with Fernando, Armando Solimões’ son (also played by Wagner Moura). A middle-age doctor in a blood-bank, formerly the very theater in which he finally saw Jaws, he seems under-whelmed by any news of his father’s death, which we now know was a murder that happened even despite the momentary escape we witness in the film. He remembers absolutely nothing about his father, even though his grandfather has long reminded him of how he dressed and waited for his appearance to take him away.

     Regarding his grandmother, who Armando had so desperately sought to learn more about, the older Fernando is convinced it was simply a marriage of servitude, but has since learned that they named her “India” and even described his father as sometimes being addressed by the same name. But he seems totally disinterested in history. Has he too become a kind of vampire, demanding Lenira donate blood before he will even speak with her?

      The researcher, an ironic designation since Armando was once described just as that, still insists, despite the fact that Fernando may find it difficult to hear, that he might wish to listen to them; handing him a stick disk of the illegally saved tapes. Fernando finally puts it in his pocket as she leaves him, she explaining that although she came all the way from São Paulo to communicate with him, she does also have family here which she will now be able to visit. Her last name being Nascimento it is highly likely that she may be related to Armando’s now dead wife, Fernando’s forgotten mother. But alas they may never come to realize that fact, just as, sadly, he may never choose to listen to his father’s voice from the past, the story we, the audience, have just so passionately suffered through.

    Yet finally we realize that it is not Armando or any of his cohorts, but this young woman who is the secret agent, the one able to provide the following generation with a history that might help them to remember and heal without her even knowing of her agency, her role in other’s lives.

     Time has way of erasing the horrible events of the past, which why later generations keep repeating the former's behavior, generation after generation making the same mistakes again and again: the lack of human understanding and compassion, the support of leaders who care more for their own power and enrichment than the betterment of the citizens they are supposed to lead.

     This film was written for our times.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Hong Khaou | Hong Khaou (screenwriter and director) Monsoon / 2019

the inscrutable world of a forgotten childhood

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hong Khaou (screenwriter and director) Monsoon / 2019

 

British director, Cambodia-born Hong Khaou has already given us the truly moving film, Lilting and three short films before Monsoon, itself a film of immense scope and emotional intensity. It is interesting that Khaou’s family fled to Vietnam after the fall of Phnom Penh, and finally became political refuges in England when the future director was only 8 years of age. If there was ever evidence of an immigrant citizen offering something of immense worth to his adopted country, the case with millions of immigrants over the years, it is Khaou.

       But what does it mean to the children of immigrants who have lost all ties to their native country? It is precisely that question which is at the heart of Monsoon. And in this case, as it must have been for Khaou himself, it is even made more complex by the fact that the family’s escape was necessary for their survival in the morass of the sudden US pullout of the Viet Nam war and other shifts in power throughout Asia.

    Somehow this director is able to walk us gently through that almost void of forgetfulness while simultaneously exploring the guilt of a US son of man whose military service helped to desolate and destroy that country, a black man, moreover, who has returned as a successful clothes manufacturer to help in the stimulation of the contemporary Viet Nam economic revival—or, to see it from a different perspective, to use the cheap labor available to him in eager-to-be developed Viet Nam.

    Khaou points to many all the duplicities and confusions that came out of those years of violence, fear, and the absurd hate that dated back to the earlier French invasion, which included not only Viet Nam, but Laos and Cambodia, sweeping them up into chaos from 1955 through 1975.

    This film, fortunately, does not attempt to deal with most of the vast political and military issues of that Indochina war, but speaks only about the muted and confused emotions of its youngest survivors, Kit (Henry Golding), who returns with his beloved mother’s ashes in hand, with the excuse of seeking out a place to spread her remains; he is to be met there by his brother, his wife, and their two children, bearing the ashes of the father. Why, queries his childhood friend Lee (David Tran) late in the movie, does he and his brother bring back the ashes of two people who tried so hard to escape the country? That question is never fully answered, and we are never sure that Kit has ever found in his search through Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi a proper place to scatter them.

     In fact, we quickly perceive, since Kit has quit his job as an apparently quite successful anime artist, is that Kit is also looking to discover something else in this voyage. He finds little of his past; his best friend from childhood, Lee, and his family are hardly recognizable, still grateful for the loan from Kit’s mother in order to open the camera and computer shop they still run. Kit brings gifts of candy, in a tin trimmed with the queen’s picture and scotch, which pleases Lee’s mother, but just a quickly alienates her with a thoughtless gift of a water purifier, presuming that the quality of the Saigon water system would be inadequate.

    And it is just this kind of small and sometimes larger faux pas that Kit, who recalls very little of the Vietnamese language, makes time and again. His memories of Lee’s and his own childhood are vague at best, and he finds their old home, almost a hovel, being torn down in order to create a modern apartment. The city is now a modern world of stunning high-rises, yet its streets—as we perceive in the opening credits—is filled with a balletic dance between automobiles, driven by the foreigners and the rich, with motorcyclists who represent most of the population. Although Kit arrives to his expensive hotel with all the luxury Western conveniences, he thereafter travels on the backseat of a hired motorcycle, the most common way of moving about the city.

    The young people he meets, such as the travel guide Linh (Molly Harris), are sophisticated and well-educated, but given that their parents have had to expend most of their savings for that education, have themselves been unable to leave the country or travel. Linh mocks her family business, which consists of pulling apart lotus blossoms to package as scented tea appreciated mostly by older tea connoisseurs, an endless activity with which she finds absolutely boring and wants no part of, while Kit finds his visit there as one of the most fascinating and enjoyable of his Hanoi experiences.

   Moreover, what few seemingly real memories Kit has, the morning where he and his brother were taken away and suddenly found themselves in a boat that deposited them eventually to England, is questioned, perhaps with some resentment by Lee, who suggests that his father first attempted to leave by himself, but having been found and returned for re-education had suddenly no choice but to attempt to escape with his entire family. In short, as critic Peter Bradshaw summarizes the event in The Guardian, “…Perhaps with a touch of cruelty, Lee is to challenge Kit’s memory of how and why he got out of Vietnam. Kit remembers the drama and the heartache of how they all left together as a family, with a kind of solidarity. But Lee tells him it wasn’t quite like that, and this revelation sows a seed of doubt and anxiety that silently flowers throughout the movie.”

     On the other hand, Lee has completely misread Kit’s reason for his visit, late in the movie explaining that he has not yet been able to raise enough money to pay of the loan Kit’s mother has made, without realizing that Kit has had utterly no intention of collecting on a debt that he doesn’t even recognize as anything but a gift from his mother.

     The series of subtle misunderstandings of culture put Kit, who is also an outsider in his queer sexuality, in a strange place as a child of a world he can no longer quite comprehend, while also having come to totally assimilate into a world (his mother insisted upon them settling in England because she liked how the queen looked) which may have not been entirely receptive to him. Emigrant children may feel at the edges of both cultures for their entire lives.

     If he looks in vain to find a wedge into his childhood world, he finds it quite easily through the growing sexual interest and finally love of another kind of outsider in Lewis (Parker Sawyers), the savvy and wise black man, whose father was involved in many a war operation, and later

committed suicide, perhaps in the response to the way his own country treated him upon his return. Lewis seems to know Saigon well, and serves as another kind of guide with whom Kit grows more and more comfortable and through whom he might even imagine a reason to remain in the place of his birth. If Lewis can be at home in a world that must feel so very alien to him, then perhaps Kit can also find a wedge into the fascinating cauldron of the old and new which Saigon has become, particularly as represented by young citizens such as Linh and assimilated outsiders such as Lewis.

     By film’s end, we do indeed witness a seasonal downpour, but it is not at all an earth-shattering monsoon of which the title hints. The film ends with our central explorer still in a state of perplexion, but nonetheless, just as we have been through watching this gently instructive film, slightly more aware of his surroundings and able to perceive nuances where before there were simply walls of confusion that resulted in exhaustion, as Kit himself explains his feelings to his brother and his family.

     This is a strange kind of road movie to a place of déjà-vu that seems vaguely familiar but doesn’t quite make sense, that yet nonetheless intrigues. Writing in Variety Jessica Kiang nicely expresses that feeling at film’s end: “Interactions are tentative, freighted with silences and glances; most exchanges end unresolved, right up to the abrupt, mid-air ending; even the sexual encounters, which occur with refreshing casualness, are portrayed rather chastely — not, one feels, out of prudishness, but because the act itself is too definitive for Khaou’s allusive, suggestive agenda.”

     All we know is that Kit has learned that there are no full-blown truths to be unearthed. There is no certain future. He stands, as he always will, in a kind of middle-ground, where meaning in life has always to be rediscovered, recreated, the place actually many us, particularly those of us who are queer, will always feel ourselves to be located: halfway in and halfway out of our own cultures.

That sense of duality is what perhaps helps many of us to simultaneously love and mock our worlds, to put it into expression as “camp.” Yet in Khaou’s vision, given the loss of life and identity, there is little humor left in the attempts at revival and resurgence. And only the company of his brother and his sons and in Parker, does Kit have a chance to truly smile and laugh.

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).