RIDING A WAVE: Le Van Loc journeys through modern-day Ho Chi Minh City in Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo, which hits U.S. screens with a vengeance. Photo Courtesy CFP
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RIDING A WAVE: Le Van Loc journeys through modern-day Ho Chi Minh City in Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo, which hits U.S. screens with a vengeance. Photo Courtesy CFP |
By Kevin Sun
Who would have expected the director of The Scent of Green Papaya to have masterminded as stunning a reverie on mutilated innocence as the relentlessly lurid Cyclo? Destined to alienate Asian-arthouse-movie fans with more delicate sensibilities, Tran Anh Hung’s sophomore effort shuns the gentility that ultimately stifled his debut feature in favor of malaise. A movie locked into a bulldozer rhythm, Cyclo plows under contrived politesse as well as such distancing storytelling devices as temporal remove and long-shot-dominated camerawork.
The film’s measured pacing and refreshingly elliptical narrative prevent viewers from becoming too distracted by the formal niceties of plot dilemmas and resolutions, and allow viewers to ponder character motivations, piece together events, and take in the scenery-which boldly dances the line between the disconcerting and the fascinating throughout.
Among other things, Cyclo is very in-your-face. The close-ups of slaughterhouse bloodletting, cesspool inhabitants, and asphyxiating souls aren’t the most fun things to watch, but they’re merely the more extreme moments in a work rife with delirious visual metaphors for Vietnam’s physical and spiritual entropy.
Cyclo trawls through the bowels of modern-day Ho Chi Minh City, shadowing a hapless, 18-year-old bicycle rickshaw driver (Le Van Loc) who inherits his father’s trade and breadwinning responsibilities after a horrible traffic accident bereaves his family of its patriarch. Hustling sunup ‘til dusk transporting fares, getting abused by the competition, shelling out a fixed percentage of his daily earnings to the local gang, and sweating-always sweating-the Cyclo, as he is identified in the credits, personifies the fatigue induced by honest labor in the service sector.
But, for someone whose profession depends upon a working knowledge of the area’s shortcuts and thoroughfares, he has more country bumpkin in him than street smarts. When his vehicle is stolen from him, right behind his back, the Cyclo has to compensate the gang for their lost property and is coerced into pulling off petty crimes. Under the guidance of the Poet (Tony Leung Chi Wai from Chungking Express)-the solitary, quietly intense gang lieutenant who drafts him into the underworld-the Cyclo changes almost imperceptibly from a boy-next-door type into an aspiring hoodlum who gets a mean adrenaline rush off his seductive new lifestyle.
The desecration of all things pristine isn’t so much a constant possibility in Cyclo-it’s an everyday fact. Blood staining white is a recurring image and on-screen atrocities are regularly punctuated with scenes of children staring wide-eyed into the camera. A ceremony for mourning the dead sets the stage for a ring of pickpockets. An autistic youngster dies abruptly when a ragtag crew of street urchins victimize him with their pranks.
In Cyclo’s disturbing universe, innocents routinely act out the unthinkable. While the Cyclo pursues his desire to join the gang, his sister (Tran Nu Yen Khe, the director’s wife, from Papaya) links up with the Poet. Treating her as another fragile plaything whose breaking point must be tested-much like her brother-the bastard decides to prostitute her. A virgin infatuated with her pimp, this ingenue gets to enjoy the dubious privilege of being hands-off merchandise-a distinction that doesn’t stop all the creepy fetishists in Ho Chi Minh from swarming to her to get their rocks off.
Her inevitable deflowering is a violent, traumatic-and mercifully off-screen-ordeal that unleashes all the destructive energy seething underneath the Poet’s calm exterior and that prompts him into a murderous, cold-eyed rage that precipitates the two tragedies that close the movie.
Impressed if apparently unfazed by the brutality surrounding him, enthralled if seemingly untouched by any sort of purity that manages to thrive in this unforgiving environment, the Poet is Tran’s on-screen proxy. Commentating laconically on the film’s proceedings, the former manages to isolate beauty amid dashed hopes and urban decay just as surely as the latter does. The Poet’s restrained demeanor, along with some mysterious physical afflictions and one awful haircut, help make the character a remarkable contrast to the trash-talking, trigger-happy Hong Kong gangster archetypes Leung’s tightrope performance simultaneously honors and deconstructs.
If the Poet is simply one more solid turn in Leung’s resume, Le Van Loc’s Cyclo qualifies as a major talent discovery. An unknown plucked out of Da Nang, Le registers exhaustion in every hunch of his shoulders, in the way he shambles and waddles and, most spectacularly, in subtle facial contortions that run the emotional gamut from weariness to futility to panic, from defiance to ecstasy.
Le’s feat is amazing-and he never showboats. If Tran is positing the Cyclo’s family as a microcosm for a Vietnam undergoing economic reform, then this resilient kid symbolizes the erosion of the altruistic impulses of the society around him. Nowhere is his goodwill more evident than the night, when fleeing the scene of a crime, he instinctively stops to rescue a drowning man, only to be scolded for not vacating the premises quickly enough.
Easily the most technically impressive theatrical release of 1996, Cyclo luxuriates in uncanny cinematography that suggests the revelatory hallucinations of a first-time user blissfully unaware that the descent from his high has turned into a vicious downward spiral. Bound to flop like the dying goldfish the camera contemplates in its last reel, Cyclo is triumphant on at least one count-feeling bad has rarely ever looked this good.