The Vertical Ray of the Sun

(Tran Anh Hung, France/Vietnam, 2001)

French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung takes another surprising career turn in The Vertical Ray of the Sun. His debut, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) was a minimal, subtle look at domestic power relationships within a colonised culture. His second feature, Cyclo (1995), was a garish, violent portrait of urban life that owed much to the stylistic tics of Wong Kar-wai.

Tran is back to gentleness in The Vertical Ray of the Sun, his best work to date. The social context, here, recedes into the background. The film presents a mosaic of exchanges and moments comprising the intimate lives of three sisters living in contemporary Vietnam, Lien (Tran Nu Yen-Khe), Suong (Nguyen Nhu Quynh) and Khanh (Le Khanh).

The situations of servitude, economic survival and black marketeering that animated Tran's previous films are here erased. The everyday world so lovingly rendered is not exactly luxurious, but it does form a stable enough basis for the secret intrigues of the heart that ensue.

We catch these women in transitional phases of doubt and longing. There is a closeness uniting them, but much is left unsaid about their individual forays into the unpredictable world of love. Lien shares a flat with her brother, Hai (Ngo Quanq Hai); he is a little perturbed at her jokes about them seeming like a couple.

Khanh is pregnant; her marriage to Kien (Tran Manh Cuong) seems superficially happy but each is beset by malaise. Suong, the eldest of the sisters, has the most complicated tangle of all: while pursuing an intense but strictly circumscribed affair with Tuan (Le Tuan Anh), she discovers that her husband, Quoc (Chu Ngoc Hung) has a second family elsewhere.

Tran claims not to have had Chekhov in mind when he chose three sisters as his central focus. That may be so, but his film is clearly in a certain Chekhovian tradition of cinema, including the work of Jean Renoir (Rules of the Game, 1939) and, more recently, Olivier Assayas (Late August, Early September, 1998).

Delicately passing from one story thread, mood or generation to another, Vertical Ray has the rhythm of a dance, and aspires to a detached but compassionate wisdom about love's errors and lunges.

Like all films in this tradition, The Vertical Ray of the Sun is carefully keyed to the physical feel of the seasons – here, the sticky height of summer – and the passing of time. Like the many stories of this sort that play out between the milestones of birthdays, weddings and funerals, Tran cleverly places his mosaic within the month that bridges the anniversaries of the deaths of the women's parents.

The film is refreshingly at ease with the depiction of female experience and the adoption of women's viewpoints. With a droll playfulness, Tran renders the men as an interesting but fairly stolid bunch, mostly evasive, cowardly, insensitive or hypersensitive. When these men get together, the style of the film becomes correspondingly grey and rigid.

But what joy for the senses when the women are on screen at the same time! Tran pulls out all stops – in musical selection, in the superb lighting and camera work of Mark Lee Ping-Bin (In the Mood for Love, 2000), in editing – in order to make the scenes of female interaction as vibrant as possible. The simplest gestures, such as whispered conversations or food preparation, become feasts of movement and colour.

Tran aims for an airy but not mindless lightness in The Vertical Ray of the Sun – one of the hardest things to do in cinema. In recent memory, Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996), another Chekhovian gem, stands as an exemplar. The challenge for a storyteller is to show that the most ordinary life is full of profound sadness and regret, while at the same reaching moments of supreme grace which evaporate the heaviness of this recognition. Tran achieves this balance with breathtaking success.

The Vertical Ray of the Sun is a bewitching film. Tran is unafraid to create an aesthetic form that is lush and seductive, to the point of raising the predictable complaints that his manner is close to ads or music videos. But he also undercuts this seductiveness at key moments by abruptly ending the music or juxtaposing starkly contrasting situations. This gives a very modern richness and an element of unpredictability to otherwise serenely classical material.

MORE Vietnamese cinema: Three Seasons

© Adrian Martin December 2001