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By John Demetry
The abrupt ending staves off anticipated climax. But wait. The sensitivity of Tran's vision vibrates after the movie. Influencing and prescribing patterns of seeing/understanding the world is part of the inherent power of cinema. Film's basic sensuality - the capturing of light reflected off of physical objects - lures the audience into a movie's perspective. Tran accepts that responsibility with a personal aesthetic morality - an obsession shared with the audience. His style, with this, his third movie, achieves maturation. Tran vividly reveals a sensual life force while the storytelling turns that revelation into a challenge. It's a challenge expressed as a lover's caress.
It's worth outlining those entwined plot strands, because, apparently, some people have had trouble following them. Hardly a surprise in an era when Steven Spielberg's A.I. - Artificial Intelligence, the greatest movie most people have been offered the chance to see, is thrown onto the scrap heap and President Golly G.W. threatens to turn the whole world into a scrap heap. Obviously, there's difficulty taking it all in: sensual and moral lushness. The story of these three sisters overcoming that difficulty presents another opportunity to film audiences to do the same. The eldest sister, played by Nguy Nhû Quynh, is married to and has a son by a photographer played by Chu Hûng. He never shows his work. It turns out that his photographs of a woman and her child hold a secret that threatens his marriage. Nguy, herself, carries on a secret life: a speechless affair with a man who has the same name as the man with whom the dead mother may have had an affair. The husband of the middle daughter (Lê Khanh) goes on a trip to uncover the identity of the dead mother's possible lover. Instead, he ends up finding the cure for his writer's block - and for his anxiety over his wife's recent pregnancy. The temptation of adultery on that trip brings him closer to understanding his wife's mother. Dealing with her suspicions, Le also finds her father's strength and love in herself. That's artistic imagination applied to everyday life. Those two marriages create a kaleidoscopic meditation on the parents' own marital troubles and resolutions. They mix, match, and mirror the roles of mom and dad into dazzling domestic designs.
The relationship between the youngest siblings, twin sister (Trân Nû Yên
Khê) and brother (Ngô Quang Hâi), is more prismatic. Trân Nû Yên Khê
suggests that she and her brother, who is an actor, would make a perfect
couple - and his stolen glances do not contradict the idea. This represents
either a concentration of the film's themes into a radical ray of light or
that single source of mother-father love light exploded into a revolutionary
rainbow.
Supporting the analogy, shifting planes of wall colors within the frame detail the space both of the apartment shared by the twins and of their relationship. Repeated scenes of the twin sister dancing flirtatiously and posing languorously - set to Velvet Underground tracks - in the apartment mark the emotional progression of the story. This emotionally resonant use of color and movement signals the presence of cinematographer Mark Lee who did the equally sumptuous In the Mood for Love; next to Spielberg, Lee is the movie artist of the year. Tran and Lee's collaboration make for spectacularly sexy and suggestive color and light shows. Unforgettable images: lingerie laid upon a television screen, the lip marks on a black veil covering a birdcage, the turn of a camera that reveals a smudge on a wall as footprints, Le's incandescent grin when she tells her husband that she's pregnant, Chu floating on his back in a lake surrounded by mountains, the pan from the sisters shaking water from their thick vine-like hair to the fish in a pool of water, and one shot poses and then answers the question: is that a fish or a child splashing in the lake? The meanings conveyed in these moments link Tran's art with that of the sisters' three "husbands": storytelling by means of photography and performance. His felicitous narrative parallels, like the replaying of the mother's adultery, constitute a profound worldview. As if acknowledging their sexy screen dream status, Trân Nû Yên Khê and Ngô rehearse a lovers' adieu from Ngô's latest movie role. Tran repeats the scene in "real" life between two other sets of lovers with telling changes in shot composition and character movement. Complicating this life/art symbiosis, Tran casts his wife, Trân Nû Yên Khê, as the lead in all of his films. The sisters are more than just the objects of inspiration for the men - they experience and live life artistically. And they accomplish it together in scenes of emotional and physical tenderness. Through their sensual appreciation, the sisters develop truly imaginative solutions to the conundrums that life and love bring them. That best illuminates the nature of Tran's special artistry. Tran makes movies the way people should make love. |
Trân Anh Hûng's Vertical Ray of the Sun 
© 1997-2002 BEI