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[Short Reviews]

THE VERTICAL RAY OF THE SUN

You can forgive a movie a lot when it opens with a nice apartment. An airy space, with earth-tone walls, funky artwork everywhere, Lou Reed on the stereo. It could be an overpriced pad in Greenwich Village, but the window opens to the lilac light of present-day Hanoi, and the color and composition reflect the exquisite sensibility director Tran Anh Hung showed in his first two films, Cyclo and The Scent of Green Papaya. That control extends also to his handling of characters and relationships, at least until a messy melodramatic tendency takes over.

The apartment is home to young Hai (Ngô Quang Hai) and his kid sister Liên (Tran Nu Yên-Khê, the director’s real-life wife), who engage in a flirtatious banter suggesting an odd family dynamic that’s intensified when they join their two sisters for their mother’s memorial. At first Tran establishes the family unit with convincing detail — the three sisters singing while huddled over the cooking evoke years spent together. And he unravels the strands of the siblings’ lives with dreamy obliqueness. One sister and her writer husband seem happy, but the other’s husband has drifted away and she has taken comfort in an anonymous affair.

As their stories get messier, though, so does the storytelling, with unexpected lovers and a love child popping up in the last act. When in the end poor Liên demonstrates shocking naïveté for cheap effect, a trite betrayal by Tran of his most charming character, you wish she and Hai had never left home.

By Peter Keough

Issue Date: August 9 -16, 2001