The Vertical Ray Of The Sun. - Review - movie review

Film Comment, May, 2001 by Chuck Stephens

THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN

Tran Anh Hung, Vietnam, 2000

In all the critical clamor over those boys and girls of a certain age currently held responsible for the resurrection of French cinema, it's hardly surprising that Tran Anh Hung's name rarely comes up. Though a contemporary of Assayas, Denis, Desplechin and Carax, the 38-year-old Tran -- Vietnamese-born but Paris-educated and assimilated -- exists in a shadow world of his own making.

All of Tran's films -- The Scent of Green Papaya (93), Cyclo (95) and The Vertical Ray of the Sun -- have been French-produced and financed, yet they all take place on Vietnamese soil, and the hearts and minds of their inhabitants are rooted there. Never mind that the title of the director's latest film -- a dissonant melodrama about sisters and their lovers in verdant present-day Hanoi -- seems to distantly evoke Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert, or that The Scent of Green Papaya (set in 1951 Saigon) was shot entirely on a soundstage in Boulogne. Perhaps the pertinent question isn't "How French are Tran's films?", but -- as Tran himself seems to both ask and avoid with every image he makes -- "How French is 21st-century Vietnam?"

The opening of The Vertical Ray of the Sun gives viewers some sense of this double bind. On a still and bird-sung morning in a brightly decorated apartment, Hai, a Vietnamese man in his mid-twenties, dowses a chirruping alarm clock and switches on the stereo. Hai's sister, Lien -- a frond-shaped beauty played by Tran's perennial muse, the luminescent Tran Nu Yen-Khe -- reluctantly stirs and stretches as the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" begins to fill the room. The space of the apartment may suggest something of Hou Hsiao-hsien's multiple narrative depths: two bedrooms separated by a doorway without a door, two beds jammed up against either side of the door frame, with nothing more than a curtain of silk separating the siblings as they sleep. But, there's nothing passive or patient about the way Tran and cinematographer Mark Lee (In the Mood for Love) photograph Hai and Lien, bobbing and weaving with the movements of the playful couple as if they were young Parisians being shadowed and illuminated by Olivier Assayas and his cameraman, Denis Lenoir.

Those tempted to speculate, on the basis of these possibly transcontinental signals, that The Vertical Ray of the Sun might prove to be Tran's "French-est" film are soon disabused of the notion. Increasingly given to observing intimacies from behind scrims of lush foliage, Tran dissolves that early francophony in a tincture of whispered tones and alienated shadows, beneath which patient viewers may discern the lattice of a vaguely Chekhovian tale of three sisters. Suong, the eldest, runs a small cafe while her husband Quoc, a botanical photographer, is frequently on the road, documenting strains of flora on the banks of remote lagoons. Middle sister Khan, newly pregnant, is married to Kien, a blocked writer just 17 pages from finishing his first novel. Lien, unrequited in her longingly incestuous attachment to her brother, chases after a sullen suitor named Ho, hoping for the sexual connection to adulthood her sisters already know. Each of the women, it transpires, has secrets to keep and surprises in store.

Contrary to the kaleidoscopic expressionism of Cyclo, where desire and desecration in modern-day Saigon seemed to explode from what Tran once described as "a trashcan of light," The Vertical Ray of the Sun is an altogether brighter, if increasingly plangent, affair. Taking his cues from impressionist painting, the director arranges the movements and attitudes of the sisters as if they were lilies in a tall vase, their faces ellipsing and eclipsing one another while their story calmly drifts from one pregnant possibility to the next. And though bookended by the anniversaries of their parents' deaths, and fraught with ominous departures and unexpected returns, the film dedicated to Tran's wife and five-year-old son -- remains everywhere fertile and alive. Overwhelmingly erotic as well, even if the engorged but inextinguishable passions off the characters are often displaced upon a series of macro scopically-photographed surface seductions: sparks of water dancing in a brass bowl, lovers kissing (a la Magritte) through silk scarves, a bowl of loose beads flung into the air and fallen to earth as giant drops of spattering rain.

This balance between the intimate and the exterior, the tactile and the untouchable, is the film's major achievement. The more the sisters seem to confess to one another, the less they seem to say, and the way that so many of the longings in the film are quieted without being fully quelled is part of its haunting and unnerving beauty. Everything that first seems strange is made familiar, then made strange again, and the more we hear of Lou Reed's voice, the more alien it becomes. There may be something typically or traditionally "Vietnamese" about the way that composer Ton That Tiet's late-modernist score for anguished strings adds another layer of pensive overhang to this at-times abject melodrama's already emotionally overgrown surface, but how are we to know? The invisibility of Vietnamese cinema to the rest of world is but another of The Vertical Ray of the Sun's pregnant silences -- and of Tran's not-quite-classifiable career.