CYCLO (Xich lo) (director/writer: Tran Anh Hung; cinematographer: Benoit Delhomme/ Laurence Tremolet; editor: Nicole Dedieu; cast: Le Van Loc (Rickshaw Driver), Tony Leung-Chiu Wai (The Poet, A Pimp), Tran Nu Yen Khe (Prostitute, older sister of the rickshaw driver), Le Kinh Huy (Grandfather), Pham Ngoc Lieu (Little Sister), Nguyen Nhu Quynh (Madam), Van Day Nguyen (Mr. Lullaby), Le Tuan Anh (Handcuff Man), 1995-Vietnam/France)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Cyclo was shot in modern Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). It was directed and written by Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya), as if he were a tourist visiting hell, shocked by all the squalor he sees. He was born in Vietnam and ever since he was 13, in 1975, he has lived in Paris. The Vietnamese city he revisits is a demoralizing place, where poverty and crass materialism go hand to hand. In this somber world, the director chooses to let his characters be nameless, as they are given nicknames derived from either their occupation or some description used to identify them.
The 18-year-old cyclo driver (Le Van Loc) has the right face of despair for this hellhole he was born into and can't escape from, not finding much to smile about as he pedals all over this bustling town picking up fares to help keep his family supplied with the bare necessities, and returns at night to the small two-room open shack the family lives in, in what seems to be an endless cycle of suffering.
The pedicab cyclo driver's mother died at childbirth and his father died in a truck accident while he was young. Now everyone must work in this family even if they are too old, too infirmed, or too young. His elderly grandfather repairs tires, his very young sister shines shoes, and his very special older sister (Tran Nu Yen Khe-the director's wife), a beautiful and gentle young lady, is the matriarch of the family and works as a water carrier in the marketplace.
This is a humanistic story told in a surrealist manner, about young men who need their father's help, but all their fathers are either dead, or abusive, or can't help them, and the boys are caught in a vicious circle that they can't get out of. Their miserable lives have no good prospects in sight and no good father-figure around to help them.
Poetry is the vehicle of choice for how the story is best transcribed onscreen, since dialogue is almost non-existent. It is told as if time doesn't exist, one event runs into another and everything seems jumbled. Images of water and fire are used throughout the film for purposes of symbolically cleansing the soul and destroying the impurities in it.
Paint is used as a contrast to blood. Crazy Son, the Madam's son, paints his face yellow and gets Cyclo confused as to who he is, thinking that he might be his father. When Cyclo is drugged out, he paints his face blue and swallows some goldfish (whatever that symbolically means), and the Madam confuses him for her son, forgiving him for everything, as she sings lullabies to him.
In a film loaded with contrasts, the huge gap between most of the population which is poor, is harshly contrasted with those who have money to burn.
Innocence is being corrupted by the experienced, proving that nothing remains pure in this city that steals one's life, one's poetry, and one's spirit. It reduces the innocent to being left with no choice but to be corrupted by the city or die in poverty. In one scene Cyclo is listening to a gangster sing lullabies, while the gangster knifes to death someone who is bound and gagged.
In another abstract scene, there is a crashed U.S. Army helicopter down in the middle of a heavily trafficked Saigon street. Which signifies that there is something despairing about the foreign influence in Vietnam, but what that despair exactly means, is never clearly stated in the context of the story.
The action starts when the boy's cyclo (pronounced cee-clo) is stolen by a rival gang, and the family's main source of economic support is taken away from them. He soon becomes part of a gang ruthlessly run by the Madam, a crime boss played by Nguyen Nhu Quynh. She is the one who owned the cyclo that was stolen from him and he now pays her back with his servitude. He has forgotten his father's sound advice to self-improve, so he looks to the gangster way of life to get out of his impoverished state; he is only reminded that he is not following his father's advice when he has strong dreams that his father seems to be trying to tell him something is wrong with what he is doing.
What he is after now is power and revenge. He gets revenge when he tosses a gasoline fire-bomb into the rival cyclo garage, the one that stole his cyclo, and he later takes out the eye of one of its members, by hitting him with a board. He willingly joins the Madam's gang, coming under the caring tutelage of The Poet (Tony Leung), a small-time gang leader for the Madam. He is soon carting drugs across town during the New Year's festival, when the streets are jammed and the police are stopping to search those who look suspicious. He also becomes part of the gang's assassination squad and is given a gun to go with the switchblade he was initially given by Mr. Lullaby. He wants power, and believes that power comes from the gun he holds in his hand.
Not known to him, his virgin sister gets involved with a pimp, The Poet, who is the leader of the same gang he joined. The Poet befriends him, and his sensitivity is shown by the verses he recites off camera that are coming from his heart. In his daily life, he hardly speaks. He is linked to Cyclo by karma. He identifies with him and his choice to be a gangster rather than be poor all his life. Also, The Poet is endeared to Cyclo because the youngster still has his innocence intact. He, thereby, tries to help him as best as he can.The Poet also shows that he is capable of wordly love, as he loves Cyclo's sister and protects her, even takes her to meet his mother and father. He somehow keeps her a virgin by having her do all the kinky sex tricks that do not involve touching, like peeing for a customer.
Whenever The Poet gets tense, his nose bleeds. Blood gain is used as a symbol.
Tragedy strikes for her, when a wealthy customer, who is into handcuff bondage, rapes her. When he pays the pimp off with extra money and apologizes for what he did, this does not satisfy the pimp, who knifes him to death in a stylized killing that is very graphic. Grossly unhappy that his love is spoiled and that his life is in shambles and that his father hates him -- the pimp burns his place down and fatally shoots himself. For the Poet, losing one's innocence is tantamount to death.
This film is a visual masterpiece, capturing the frenetic pace of life in the city and the faces of sorrow on the poor; it paints an unsentimental picture of a place that is a living hell. But it is not a masterpiece storywise, as its storyline was rambling, laying no specific blame for what is happening on the local government or for that matter, on anyone, only implying how rotten the Western influence is. Also, it seemed to me, there were too many violent scenes, as the filmmaker seems to revel in them without expounding on them. He seems to be expressing an unclear reason for his rage through the use of his troubling images, not letting up on the nightmare he sees before him, but also not saying why he thinks the violence is inevitable.
This powerful film offers westerners a potent dosage of what life is like in a third world country, a country most Americans only envision in a depersonalized way, but the film still had too many gaps in its storytelling and too many loose ends it left not fully developed. Cyclo, as a person, should have been more flesh-and-blood like, rather than used as merely a morbid symbolic example of the loss of innocence. There was something there that just seemed to be elusive about the film, the director just wouldn't let the viewer get into without imposing his own personal barriers; he doesn't even want to give us their real names, as if he thought, we would sully their hardships even more than it already is. He mainly wants to shock our sensibilities, to have us look plaintively at his native country like he does, even if he too is only a tourist. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but his social designs could have been painted with clearer brush strokes.
The contrast between those who are gentle and those who are brutal, and those who are dreamers and those who can't dream anymore, could have been better utilized than to point out the obvious, of how wretched a place this is and of how the gentle (innocent) have little chance of succeeding.
Still, this is one powerful film, filled with relentless and disturbing visualizations, whose poetic voice comes from the inside of the director and is strong and boiling over with metaphorical emotion.
Cyclo was a deserved winner of a Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 4/21/2000 GRADE: B+
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews