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Cyclo
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Cyclo is the second
feature by Tran Anh Hung, who impressed many with his debut, The Scent of Green Papaya (1993). I was
told, before seeing it, that Cyclo was a little like a Leos Carax film. That's true; it also resembles an Abel
Ferrara low-life movie such as Bad Lieutenant (1992), with its mysterious, abrupt
plotting, and its endless scenes of people getting wasted in clubs under strobe
lights, thrashing about to harsh, booming music.
However,
the setting here is not New York but Saigon. If this film holds a grim
fascination at times, that's because it has an almost sensationalist,
tabloid-exposé feel: ‘Here’s what Saigon has sunk to today!’
But
I couldn't get into Cyclo at all; for
me, neither of the extremes that in concert create the grunge effect in
cinema work well or sit right here.
First,
grunge’s documentary side. The real, indeed hyperreal, gritty side about life
in contemporary Saigon (centred on cyclo driving work), comes over like some
overwrought, apocalyptic fantasy of Hell.
I
always suspect the veracity of gloom-and-doom portraits that cast their men and
women in the same old binary gender roles: all the men are glamorous gangsters,
dreamers and fast-movers, while the women are mothers, prostitutes and mousy,
abused victims. It’s like some elegant diagram of a lost, hopeless world,
perfectly determined and grid-like – a bit reminiscent of Fassbinder or Mike
Leigh at their worst.
The
second, opposite extreme side to grunge is the poetic stuff. Cyclo works over-hard to make every
single image beautiful in a pronounced, theatrical, elongated way (very close
at moments to Wong Kar-wai as well as Carax) – even when what we are seeing is
violence, death, vomiting, asphyxiation, and so on. Tran gives us faces
plunging into water at askew angles in slow-motion; people painting themselves
all blue or yellow; and a cool, glamorous gangster (Tony Leung as “the poet”!) moving
through the street-level passageways of this Hell like an Angel of Death.
Cyclo is deadening in its
repetitions. It just keeps re-posing its duality of stinking Hell and poetic Love.
But neither this love or this poetry, this all-pervasive beauty, can ever bring
any redemption to the characters … let alone any transformation into their
social world.
In
the end, all that Cyclo can give us
are relentlessly vivid aesthetic sensations – of colour, music and blank verse
poetry – that point to another, better world. However, the bridge to this world
is absolutely nowhere in sight; and so we collapse back down to street level.
And at street level, as Bob Dylan once put it in an immortal grunge moment: everyone
not busy being born is busy dying.
© Adrian Martin November 1996 |
