Cyclo Reviews

Part neorealist urban drama and part surrealist hallucination, director Tran Anh Hung's second feature -- his startling follow-up to the hypnotic SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA -- is an altogether electrifying vision of life in contemporary Vietnam. Tran uses De Sica's THE BICYCLE THIEF as a point of departure, but here the theft of the impoverished young protagonist's bicycle -- or, more accurately, his cyclo, or bicycle taxi -- sets him on a very different kind of journey, one that takes him deep into a nightmarish netherworld of crime and extreme violence. Deprived of his livelihood by a rival cyclo gang, the Cyclo (Le Van Loc) -- like all the other characters in the film, he's never named -- falls under the influence of a brooding gangster (Tony Leung-Chiu Wai), who, unbeknownst to the Cyclo, is also pimping his sister (Tran Nu Yen Khe). It's a simple plot, fractured and fragmentary, in which events repeat themselves down through generations and across Ho Chi Minh City with the same inexorable logic as Tran's audacious imagery: the tender flesh of a meaty fruit, sliced open with a razor then splashed with blood; the Cyclo, covered in blue paint (one of several references to Godard), with a plastic bag over his head and a gun in his hand. Tran's film is a startling achievement: brimming with moments of exquisite tenderness and shocking brutality -- sometimes simultaneously -- and each invested with an almost perverse beauty.