THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN (À LA VERTICALE DE L'ÉTÉ) Rated PG-13 112 minutes subtitles Written and Directed by Tran Anh Hung WHEN, WHERE Opens today at Plan B
Some movies enter through the eyes and the senses, and bypass the brain. Tran Anh Hung's new movie is bathed in languorous heat, drenched in humidity and rainfall, misted in cigarette smoke, steeped in the scent of green papaya. There are story specifics, but they're not insistent. There is romance, and there are romantic crises, but they are not resolved and nobody seems to care.
The center of the world of this movie is three sisters living in contemporary Hanoi. The youngest, Lien (played by the director's beautiful wife Tran Nu Yen-Khe, who has appeared in his features "Cyclo" and "The Scent of Green Paqpaya") shares an apartment with her brother Hai (Ngo Quanq Hai), and seems to entertain incestuous feelings for him, if she even knows what that means – we later discover she is hopelessly sexually naïve. The middle sister, Kanh (Le Kanh), is married to aspiring writer Kien (Tran Manh Cuong), who is blocked about 20 pages shy of the end of his first novel. The oldest, Suong (Nguyen Nhu Quynh), runs a café and is married to a melancholy photographer named Quoc (Chu Hung), and both are involved in unusual romantic entanglements outside the bonds of matrimony.
But then these murky romantic tangles are par for the family course. Their mother, now deceased, had some sort of involvement at some time in her life with a man other than her husband. It could have been a schoolgirl crush – nobody knows for sure, and the more they think about it, the more they think it might be better to let sleeping lovers lie.
The sisters have gathered together to prepare a meal for a family memorial gathering on the anniversary of their mother's death. The preparation of food is visually irresistible in Tran's movies, and here it's enlivened with speculation about the culinary methods and taste of a central part of the male anatomy. "In the old days, women were not allowed to touch a man's face," one of them observes. "It was considered too noble a part." They giggle about the implied lack of nobility of the part under discussion. The scene seems to suggest the separate continents with their separate languages that are the two sexes, and the unbridgeable gulf between them. "Vertical Ray" unfolds in the time between the anniversaries of the deaths of the sisters' mother and their father, a month later.
There's a lot of confusion of identities in this movie, and though some of it can be ascribed to the cultural difficulty in telling people from other races apart, some of it must be intentional. Lien calls Hai "Big Brother" and he calls her "Little Sister,' but there is another young man of the same age, a prospective suitor, whom she calls "Big Brother" and who calls her "Big Sister". The mother's man of mystery was named Toan; Suong's lover is named Tuan.
But none of this matters very much. The seduction of Vertical Ray is in its ravishing visuals (it's shot by Mark Lee Ping-bin, who shot Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love), its moods, and its moments. Music figures strongly – the sisters sing songs that could be translated and find a home in Appalachia, and Lien and Hai wake up in the mornings to the sounds of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground. Some of the dialogue sounds stilted, but then we have to rely on the subtitles, and at least part of the problem may lie there. Tran is not after plot, he's after a feeling. "My thoughts turned back to my childhood in DaNang," he reflects in the production notes, "remembering the time when I'd be waiting to fall asleep at night, my mind racing from one thing to another, nothing precise. The smell of fruit coming in through the window, a woman's voice singing on the radio. Everything was so vague. It was like a feeling of suspension. If I've ever experienced harmony in my life it was then. It was just a matter of translating that rhythm and that musicality into the new film."
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