Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

Nameless river
I was born sobbing
Blue sky, vast earth
Black stream water
I grow with the months, the years
With no one to watch over me
Nameless is man
Nameless is the river
Colorless the flower
Perfume
Without a voice
O, river! O, passerby!
In the closed cycle
Of the months, the years
I can't forget my debt to my roots
And I wander
Through worlds
Towards my land
Verse of the Poet from Cyclo

After his debut success with The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), a sensitive and almost meditative minimalist affair, Tran Anh Hunh shocked his fans and the critics with a virtual 180 degree turnabout in style for his follow-up film, Cyclo (1995). Bold and innovative, Cyclo bends the rules of filmmaking in ways that some critics disdain, but to my eye, it is a beautiful and rousing triumph. If we always apply the same standards of evaluation to every new film, don't we simply place ourselves as roadblocks to innovation?

Historical Background: French film director Tran Anh Hung was born in Vietnam in 1962. His family relocated to Paris in 1975, where Tran has lived ever since. He retains some attachment to his country of birth, but has also been strongly influenced by the culture and film traditions of his adoptive country. When Tran took up filmmaking in 1995, he had hoped to make his first film, The Scent of Green Papaya, based on recollections of his mother's life in Vietnam, on site in Ho Chi Minh City. He got as far as carrying out the pre-preoduction research there, but the Vietnamese government of the nineties had a distinct aversion to the idea of reliving its colonial past and Tran ended up having to make the film on soundstages in France. He made a virtue out of necessity by producing a uniquely intimate film that could only have been possible under the circumstances of having full control of the details of set, lighting, camera positions, and sounds. The result was the first-ever Vietnamese film nominated for an Academy Award.

Soon thereafter, Tran announced his intent to make his second film about his recollections of his father and, this time, he was able to shoot the film in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Set in Cholon, a ghetto in the Chinese district of the city where people of Vietnamese and Chinese ethnicity commingle in a mutual struggle for survival, the view is one of stultifying poverty and squalor. Tran's perspective combines the intimate knowledge of an insider with the sense of shock and wonderment of an outsider.

The Story: The protagonist is a teenager (Le Van Loc), known as "Cyclo," because he operates one of the countless rickshaw-like pedicabs that provide taxi service through the city streets for those who can afford it. Cyclo's mother died in childbirth and his father died in a traffic accident while operating a pedicab. Cyclo now lives with his grandfather (Le Kihn Huy), older sister (Tran Nu Yên-Khê), and younger sister (Pham Ngoc Lieu), and the memory of his father imploring him to find something better for himself as a way of life. Everyone in the family has to scrounge so that they can survive, regardless of whether they are too old or too young to be earning a living. The old grandfather earns money pumping up bicycle tires. The little sister shines shoes and the lovely older sister works as a water carrier. They are just able to scrape by until disaster strikes. In a script twist out of De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, Cyclo's pedicab is stolen by a rival outfit. That leaves Cyclo indebted to his boss, Madam (Nguyen Nhu Quynh), and he'll have to work with her gang of young hoodlums to pay back what he owes. The leader of the gang is the Poet (Tony Leung-Chiu Wai), a sensitive man who recites verse now and then but who, like Cyclo, has had to sell his soul to the criminal interests to survive and get ahead. Whenever the Poet gets anxious, his nose starts to bleed. Other members of the gang include Tooth (Hoang Phuc Nguyen) and Knife (Ngo Vu Quang Hal).

Cyclo's older sister also has to change careers after the loss of Cyclo's income to the family. Poet becomes her pimp, though he assigns her only fetish customers, so as to preserve her virginity. We see her first with a man who wants to watch her urinate. Later, it's a man with a foot fetish. In the latter instance, she seems actually to derive a bit of pleasure from the event.

Cyclo's first criminal experience is a heist of some goods near the river. Later, he tosses a Molotov cocktail into the establishment of the rival outfit that had stolen his pedicab. The proprietor staggers out, clothes aflame. Later, during the New Year's festival, Cyclo is assigned the cross-town delivery of drugs that have been sewn into some slabs of pork. Cyclo is also assigned the job of assassinating a rival gang leader, by the rather primitive means of stabbing the man in the eye using a board with a protruding nail. Cyclo has to witness the murder of a bound and gagged man by the gang's head assassin, Lullaby Man (Day Nguyen), so called because he sings a lullaby to his victims before "rocking" them into eternal sleep. Cyclo is given the murder weapon – a switchblade – as a "souvenir." Later, he is given a handgun and assigned a major assassination job.

The Madam has a son, called Crazy Son, just about the same age as Cyclo, but the boy is mentally retarded, due to an abnormal birth. The father had abandoned them as soon as he learned the boy was incompetent, but Madam is fully devoted to her son. We gather that much of the incentive for her criminal pursuits is to be able to provide for herself and her son. She gets irate when her son's caretaker is negligent, in one scene, and Crazy Son covers himself in yellow paint.

Bit by bit, these folks, who are clinging to the last threads of their respective humanity, each find themselves in over their heads. Cyclo's sister is raped by one of her fetish customers, Handcuff Man (Le Tuan Anh), who then tries to buy off the irate Poet and his gang for an extra bit of cash. Poet stabs the guy to death anyway (both the rape scene and the subsequent revenge scene were apparently partly censored for the American release, which totals five or six minutes less that what was shown in Europe). Poet, disgusted with himself, sets fire to his apartment and goes up in flames with his abode. Meanwhile, Crazy Son is frightened by some firecrackers set next to him by some taunting children. He runs in front of a fire truck that is responding to Poet's bit of arson. Elsewhere, Cyclo is so much on edge about the assassination he is supposed to conduct that he takes some drugs and alcohol and goes into a toxic psychosis. He smears himself with blue paint before passing out. Later, he is cradled by Madam, who is now desperate for someone on whom to displace the attachment she has just lost.

Themes: One theme of the film is patriarchy and the terrible consequences when it fails, for one reason or another. Cyclo desperately needs the support and guidance of the father that he lost too soon in life. Though he has the memory of his father's advice, it is too little to sustain him as he confronts the vicissitudes of life. Crazy Boy's father abandoned him and his mother. Poet had a father, but a terribly abusive one. When boys grow up without fathers (or at least a stand-in), misery tends to get passed from one generation to the next. These boys have been abandoned to a world in which the only choices are grinding poverty or criminal pursuits. The result is the corruption of innocence. The result is despair and alienation.

You're all that's left me, orphaned winter tree.
You're all that's left me, icy old abandoned street.
Slip of winter moon.

Cyclo has been criticized for failing to identify a social agenda for addressing the conditions that it catalogs. Who is to blame? What can be done about it? Sometimes there are no simple answers, yet one of the functions of art is to force us to recognize truths, including the ugly ones, even when there are no obvious solutions. Tran may not reduce the problem down to a single culprit, but clearly one of the factors that he hints at is the aftermath of the horrible war waged against Vietnam by America. The cycle of fatherless families can certainly be understood to have been set in motion by the needless slaughter of thousands of men during the Vietnam War. Tran also hints at the corrupting influence of continuing Westernization, through images of an American ten-dollar bill and the wreck of an American helicopter being carted through the city. Tran, however, makes no attempt to reduce the problem of ghetto poverty down to one single cause.

Production Values: One couldn't construct a script more diametrically opposed to the sweet sentimentality of The Scent of Green Papaya. Here, Tran gives us a brutal story laced with graphic violence and kinky sexuality. It is a powerful script but one that has been criticized for providing too little character development and no characters with which viewers can identify very deeply. I think, however, that this is a rare instance where the lack of depth in the character portrayals was entirely intentional and, I would argue, appropriate. Tran goes so far as to not even identify the characters with personal names. The names listed in the credits only identify each character by role ("grandfather" or "sister") or some descriptive feature ("tooth" or "poet"). There is relatively little dialog and the facial expressions are mostly vacant and blank-faced. Tran's intent, I believe, is to make his main character the city ghetto, which he thoroughly reveals through stunning photomontages, rather than the individuals who populate the city. There is no lack of character development, if one understands that the protagonist is the ghetto. Cyclo is a vision of hell on earth, where all the occupants have been finally and fully dehumanized. There is no discernible time frame in the telling of the story, so we can also understand that this is an eternal damnation. This devil's lair will permit nothing pure or innocent to remain uncorrupted. We are given glimpses, here and there, of how such innocence might have been manifested in a more receptive world, such as one scene in which a lively water fight occurs between Cyclo's sister and two of her fellow prostitutes. They giggle like a bunch of debutantes at a slumber party. The few scenes of this type stand in stark contrast to the overall feeling of hopelessness.

Cyclo is a mainly expressionist vision, with occasional bouts of surrealism. The logic of the flow of the film is dream-logic (or, perhaps, nightmare-logic) rather than rational progression. Cyclo may borrow in one respect from The Bicycle Thief, but it has none of that film's realism. There's a high quotient of symbolism, including a variety of fluids (water, blood, sweat, urine, paint, etc.), fire (the Molotov cocktail, the final arson scene, electric shocks, New Year's fireworks), and primitive critters (goldfish and lizards). In one scene, Cyclo snaps the tail off a lizard and sticks one end between his lips while it is still thrashing, giving him the appearance of having a snake's tongue. In another scene, Cyclo, who is drenched in blue paint, takes a goldfish part way into his mouth; it looks like some creature being sucked into some terrible pit of despair.

The fantastical quality of the film is carried even more by its cinematography (provided by Benoit Delhomme) than its script. The glossy visual style of the film is more reminiscent of music videos or surrealistic paintings than conventional cinematography. The city streets in Cyclo are teeming cauldrons of activity. There is obvious artistry in many of the individual shots and the color schemes are stunning. The expressionist and surreal components are so artfully blended that it is not always possible to identify the points of transition from one to the other. The editing is very effective, sometimes suddenly cutting, for example, between a horrible image and another of ethereal tranquility. There are strobe light shots, backlit shots, and a rich variety of other creative lighting arrangements. The visual stylishness is the one sense in which the film can be seen as a continuation of Tran's work in The Scent of Green Papaya. The soundtrack of Cyclo combines what sounds like traditional Asian flute music with avant-guard classical absolute music.

The performances are all quite good, though, in truth, these are not the most difficult roles that you'll find in film, given that the main requirement was projecting alienation and emptiness. Tony Leung Chui-wai has had tougher roles in such films as Hard-Boiled (1992), Chungking Express (1994), and In the Mood for Love (2000). Tran Nu Yên-Khê, who is the director's wife, also starred in his debut film. The youngster, Le Van Loc, did a commendable job with the lead role of Cyclo.

Bottom-Line: Cyclo took the 1995 Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Though unrated, it undoubtedly would receive an "R" rating in America if it were, for a lot of violence, some drug use, and a smidgen of kinky sex. If you're hung-up on conventional character development, you might want to skip this film, but for those attuned to spectacular visual imagery with some thematic depth to boot, check it out. This film has an amazing look to it. Cyclo is in Vietnamese with optional English subtitles and has a running time in the American release of 123 minutes.


*************************************************************************************************
You might want to check out this other excellent film from Vietnam:

The Scent of Green Papaya


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age