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 very bustling city has a forgotten class of
people, those that work behind the scenes keeping the machine running. These
are also the people that the normal denizens don't see and don't want to
see. I'm talking about laborers and menial service providers like cab
drivers, street cleaners and dry goods loaders. These are the people you
only see if you look down the back alleys during the day, the kind that generally live in poverty, often struggling with more than one job to get
by. The situation is more graphic and obvious in developing countries, where
poverty and privilege co-exist out in the open because the divide is not as
large as in the West. The plights of these 'invisible' people have been
given the film treatment as early as Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and as recently as Jim Sheridan's "In
America". In-between those two movies, there is 1995's
"Cyclo."
Set
in the bustling and mean streets of modern day Ho Chi Minh City, the
Vietnamese "Cyclo" is a slice of life film about a poor teenage
pedicab driver (aka a cyclo, played by the suitably emaciated looking Le Van
Loc) as poverty and bad luck pushes him down the dark path of organized
crime. He struggles to eek out a living for his two sisters and grandfather,
using a pedicab rented from the local Madame at usurious rates. When the
Madame has the cyclo cab stolen in order to rent it back to him at even
higher rates, she points the cyclo over to her chief enforcer, a brooding,
silent brute known only as The Poet (Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, "Infernal
Affairs"). Under The Poet's guidance, the cyclo becomes involved in
the seedy underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City's organized crime racket, starting
small by destroying rice shipments and rapidly graduating to murder and drug
trafficking.
"Cyclo" uses parallel stories to follow the
cyclo, the cyclo's virginal older sister's love for The Poet (despite the
fact that he's pimping her out), and the Madame's struggle to come to
terms with her retarded son. While the conceit used to introduce the main
protagonist is lifted directly from De Sica's "The Bicycle
Thief," director Tran Anh Hung casts the characters in his own
metropolitan hell. The film is about cycles of despair, a world where
there is no escape from poverty. Sons follow their father's footsteps
because the idea of anything better is alien. This is a path that has been
tread before, but Hung makes it seem new by spreading his story out over
several interesting characters and then deftly bringing them together
through very matter-of-fact circumstances.
The stories are a bit too threadbare to stand on
their own, but when put together against the larger backdrop of the
unforgiving machine that is the city, it all works quite well. The picture
of life in the underbelly of society that Hung presents is one of people
being beaten down by the machine. Daily hardships that would seem
oppressively unyielding to most of us are just the cost of getting by to
the underclass, and they accept it as such. Life is reduced to a routine
series of humiliations that the people must let roll off their backs if
they wish to survive till the next morning.
The film is full of moments of unspoken ritual, and
nihilistic fatalism permeates every aspect of life in "Cyclo".
Even the most banal activities become weighted with significance as every
moment of each character's waking life is enslaved to the practical
demands of survival. Hung draws poignant parallels between water and
blood, life and death, and suffering and renewal. All feature prominently
in the day-to-day toils of the struggling poor. Life and death take on
more resonance for the underclass because it is an undeniable fact that
some must die in order for others to live. It's ugly, but it's also
reality shown in sometimes gruesome detail.
The final denouement unabashedly expresses the
hopelessness of life trapped in the city. The film is all sound and fury,
relying on the neon lights, dusty streets, noisy traffic and odd music to
keep going. In those respects, the film succeeds. The plight of the main
character is a bit too depressing and fatalistic for its own good, so the
levity provided by the eclectic visuals is a welcome respite; they also
help to keep the viewer's attention when the narrative begins to wander.
While the stories of the main characters are handled
well enough, the real attraction of "Cyclo" is the style and
feel of the film. Hung shows a sure hand with the camera, composing the
film as an esoteric mix of energetic handheld movements and beautifully
languid still frames. Vividly capturing the chaos of Ho Chi Minh City's
streets -- a dirty, dilapidated waking nightmare teeming with humanity --
Hung manages to find images of profound beauty hidden in the idyllic
countryside, as well as in the deepest slums of the city.
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