Review: Cyclo

Liquids become the motif d’abus of the film: water, blood, vomit, sweat, oil, urine, humidity, and paint.

Cyclo
Photo: New Yorker Films

For its first half-hour or so, Cyclo appears to be manifesting itself as director Tran Ahn Hung’s ode to Vittorio de Sica’s distinct brand of pessimistic, martyr-fetishizing, and squalor-affronting neo-realism. The title character (a cyclo is a bicycle taxi driver) is scraping a living together for his two sisters and grandfather by carting people to and fro within Ho Chi Minh City. Sure enough, his employer’s bicycle is snatched away from him by a group of thieves. Hmmm, I just can’t think of what other movie this reminds me of.

Thankfully, Tran uses this setup (as well as the stylistic red herring of making these early scenes becalmed and detached) to set into motion a far more unpredictable and, at times, hallucinatory series of set pieces. An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare. The cyclo (a sinewy Le Van Loc) and his sister become intrigued by the mysterious Poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) who also happens to be a gang leader and puts them both to work as a street thug and a fetish-only prostitute, respectively.

The characters, such as they are (they don’t even have names, just occupational designations), live primarily through a faintly contrived sensation-based relationship with their environment, which basically means they occasionally put living animals in their mouths. At times, these characters are reminiscent of amphibians. Liquids become the motif d’abus of the film: water, blood, vomit, sweat, oil, urine, humidity, and paint.

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It would perhaps be stretching most viewers’ tolerance beyond reason to suggest that this utilization of nature-juice is meant to stand in for the fluidity of life, especially in da ghetto, and that all of the film’s destitute and desperate souls are, like the Poet’s goldfish, trapped inside an aquarium and staring at the escape they can see but can’t reach. But at the very least, Tran’s emphasis on visual flourishes (such as an out-of-nowhere burned-out helicopter showing up in the middle of a roundabout intersection or the volcanic blood rivers that spring from slashed pigs in the slaughterhouse) functions as a unique and oddly beautiful visual blush, which makes Cyclo far removed from Bicycle Thieves indeed.

Score: 
 Cast: Le Van Loc, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Tran Nu Yen Khe  Director: Tran Anh Hung  Screenwriter: Nguyen Trung Bing, Tran Anh Hung  Distributor: New Yorker Films  Running Time: 129 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1995  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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