Solstizio d'estate

Just finished watching it, late on a Saturday night. Beautiful. Saw SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA but prefer this. Incredibly sensual, tactile, delicate shades of light, spilling over faded walls, around lush greenery, onto rough stone. Such fantastic visuals, could easily leave it playing in perpetual loop with the sound turned down, especially on the 42" LCD I don't have.

Plot? Was surprised at the level of detail, how well scenes knit together, symbols woven through a tapestry I didn't expect. One of the main reasons I prefer it to SOGP. Unexpected tensions arise, complexity swimming below surface tranquility, never quite sure where the plot is going to lead.

There isn't much in the way of conventional resolution, but that didn't matter to me. Some think the pace too slow, but heard similar complaints about IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE which I found unfounded. Doesn't have to be neat and tidy, and often there is more importance in what is not said, than what is spoken. A different mentality from many 'western' films, and certainly not the French 'nothing about nothing' that one reviewer mentioned. All in the details. And the glorious laziness of summer! I want to be there NOW.

A visually-stunning look at the lives of three modern-day Vietnamese sisters and their families, living in Hanoi. The intersection of modernism (in particular, Western) influences alongside tradition is a theme. This does not appear to be a rigid Stalinist society but an austere but comfortable developing one. A sound track which mixes Lou Reed and traditional Vietnamese music accentuates the way tradition and modernity meld in this setting.

And it is the setting which takes your breath away. Even the interiors are visually rich with colors and textures. The film's use of rain, heat, and flowing water all add to the sensuality of the country and the characters.

As a Vietnamese, I have to begin by thanking Tran Anh Hung for all that he has done for Vietnamese cinema. He has beautifully brought to the world an image of Vietnam other than that of some evil Communists in American war movies.

Now onto my review of this film.

It is a beautifully shot movie. The fresh, cool colors through the movie really do transport the viewer to somewhere similar to a tropical paradise. The story is slow but the writing is smart. Things are happening even though you feel like nothing has happened. The film is about 3 sisters and their adventures in love. The two older are married and are facing infidelity in their relationships. The youngest is still dating other men, although her close relationship with her brother only suggests some disturbing truth.

The acting is the movie is restrained but mostly good. My only problem is with Tran Nu Yen Khe as the youngest sister. I know that she is the director's wife, thus she appears in all his movie. But is this necessary, Tran Anh Hung? She is certainly a beautiful actress, but her Vietnamese is horrible. While everyone in the movie is speaking flawless, authentic Vietnamese, she struggles as if reading with a monotone in an accent that clearly indicates that she never learns Vietnamese in Vietnam. This has completely thrown me off during the movie. Whenever she speaks, I am reminded that this is a movie and not real. In Mui Du Du Xanh, the first film of Tran Anh Hung, I don't have a real problem because she speaks a total of maybe 3 lines and those are from reading a book so it doesn't bother me. But in Cyclo, while the actors and actress who play her family speak with a specific accent from a province in Vietnam (Quang Nam), she again speaks in a monotone with an accent of a foreigner. And it happens again here in this film. This problem is equivalent to an actor who plays an authentic Texan and speaks with a European accent. It just doesn't make sense. Of course, to people who don't speak Vietnamese, this is not a problem. But to a Vietnamese like myself, I can think of many other actresses who are much better for the job.

But don't let my ranting about Tran Nu Yen Khe discourage you from seeing this movie. It will be one of the most beautiful film you have ever seen and I think you will like it.

In Tran Anh Hung's lovely tone poem The Vertical Ray of the Sun, three sisters Lien (Tran Nu Yên-Khê), Suong (Nhu Quynh Nguyen), and Khanh (Le Lhanh) on the eve of memorial dinners for their departed parents reveal previously hidden details to each other about their marital infidelity. It is the end of summer in Hanoi and the atmosphere is languid. These are not the mean streets of Saigon in Tran's Cyclo but the elegant abode of Hanoi's artists and intellectuals, devoid of urban decay, intimately bathed in color and pastoral beauty. The opening scene sets the mood. The youngest sister, 19-year old Lien slowly awakens in the apartment she shares with her brother Hai (Quang Hai Ngo). As Hai does push-ups, lien stretches, her graceful Tai Chi movements beautifully choreographed to the rhythm of The Velvet Underground.

They joke about the fact that outsiders see them as a couple as they walk hand-in-hand through the markets, but Lien does nothing to discourage this perception and is shown crawling into bed with her brother each night. The sisters operate a café and the conversation is as steamy as is the food they are preparing for the annual memorial dinner for their departed mother. Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin who filmed Flowers of Shanghai and In the Mood for Love washes the scene in a glow of different shades of green as they joke and tell stories about their longing to fry the male anatomy in garlic. The discussion veers to a discussion of their mother's possible infidelity with a fellow student but they are reluctant to admit that their parent's relationship may have been less than ideal.

Gradually we also learn about the sisters' marital problems. Suong is married to Quoc (Chu Hung), a botanical photographer. Since they had a miscarriage four years prior, he has had a secret life with another woman in the remote Bay of Halong. In one meditative scene in a boat with an old fisherman, Quoc sums up the meaning of the film, "One should live where one's soul is in harmony, where it is in accord with its surroundings". When he is away on trips visiting his second family, Suong carries on an affair with Tuan (Le Tuen Anh) out of a need to feel loved and wanted. Khanh's husband is Kien (Tran Manh Cuong), a writer who is working on finishing his first novel.

After finding out that his wife is pregnant, he almost betrays her in a Saigon hotel, but remains faithful. Lien, meanwhile, naive about sexuality, has a boyfriend and thinks she is pregnant simply because she had sex one time. The family deals with these problems together, viewing them as an opportunity for forgiveness and growth rather than confrontation. Vertical Ray of the Sun is a sensual experience that unfolds in its own time, a pace geared to an Asian timetable not a Western one. It is a film of ineffable beauty but can be confusing on first viewing with multiple characters, frequent jump cuts, and time discontinuity.

Individual scenes stand out in memory: Khanh singing a traditional Vietnamese song alone in the garden and Kien's loving discovery of her secret (how gratifying it is to see a romantic scene between married couples); Lien's slow dance in her apartment to The Velvet Underground, her long black hair glistening in the sun; and Lien's playful seduction of Hai interrupted by his request for boiled sweet potatoes. Though concerned with extra marital affairs, the film is not about infidelity but the intrusive effects of modern society on Asian family life. In Vertical Ray of the Sun, he has created an antidote -- an aesthetic picture of a Vietnam unsullied by the memory of war, a culture of nature and tradition, encompassing the Buddhist value of compassion and the Confucian ideal of harmony. It may exist, however, only in his vision.

If you understood that "Seinfeld" was about nothing, then you will accept that "Vertical Ray of the Sun" is about almost nothing. For instance, Hanoi is awash in color and brother and sister listen to Lou Reed while they exercise their bodies and exorcise their incestuous longings. Nothing else happens.

Meanwhile 2 other sisters are working through affairs that threaten their marriages but resolve in the film to uncertainty about their future. What is certain is the "violent and passionate undercurrent," as director Tran calls it, with a "mischievous humor to it." I failed to find the humor or the passion, just a ballet of souls languishing in the boredom of marriage or the banality of emotional incest.

Almost certainly influenced by Chekov and his equally subtle 3 sisters, the director feels that "[h]armony, or the art of keeping up appearances, could be the title of the story." That's the real beauty of this melodramatic nap, that passion hidden away from the world disguises everyone involved, so that only a wife could suspect a look or an innocent-looking note. On the surface is a harmony, a café of peaceful meetings owned by sisters whose stories will never be publicly told with passion or humor.

Any movie that calmly shows skin being pulled from a chicken foot or sisters talking furtively about sauteing and eating a penis should be full of passion and humor. It is not. It rather shows the director's appreciation of the Robert-Bresson school of directing where essence comes before adventure, restraint before passion.

Perhaps the director aptly characterizes his movie when he says, ''My thoughts turned back to my childhood in DaNang, 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.''

I vote for "suspension" as this slowly beautiful film's operative word.