`Cyclo's' Canvas Is A Busy Vietnamese Street

----------------------------------------------------------------- Movie review

XXX "Cyclo," with Le Van Loc, Tran Nu Yen Khe, Tony Leung-Chiu Wai, Nguyen Nhu Quynh. Written and directed by Tran Anh Hung, with dialogue by Nguyen Trung Bing and Hung. Varsity. No rating; includes graphic violence, adult situations. -----------------------------------------------------------------

In the opening scene of Tran Anh Hung's second feature-film, a young cyclo-taxi driver, glistening with sweat, pedals through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City and remembers advice from his dead father. In voice-over, the father, a cyclo driver himself, worries that "I will leave you with nothing" and says, "I don't know where this all leads." At which point street sounds burst into the scene, asserting the cyclo-driver's real inheritance.

The pattern becomes familiar: The volume of activity on the street, with its unmappable bicycle traffic, gang violence and the ceaseless din of work, threatens the quiet interior.

But it's also a narcotic: Over and over, characters walk onto balconies to stare at the street as though at a canvas. That spell binds the first hour of this determinedly slow-paced, episodic, and often beautiful film.

About one family's precarious hold on a nearly mythic Eden of poverty in the new Vietnam, "Cyclo" has in Le Van Loc (in the title role) an actor startlingly attuned to his character, whether running water on his feet or drunkenly painting his face blue.

The radiant Tran Nu Yen Khe (from Hung's earlier "The Scent of Green Papaya") plays his sister with equal power as nominal head of the family, and along with their grandfather and younger sister the family pieces together a life above the streets and beside a stream of rushing water.

Then one day thieves steal the cyclo. The son joins a vicious gang formed by a poet who has begun to turn "Sister" into a prostitute. A veteran of John Woo action films, Tony Leung-Chiu Wai unfortunately plays the poet as a numb blur of smoke.

The story of Cyclo and Sister turns grimmer and bloodier before it comes around, following the title, to something else again. But "Cyclo's" agitated surface is fascinating, with lyrical interludes occasionally interrupting the action and daylight bumping into saturated nighttime reds and blues. Hung here uses an expressionism that pins bloody noses to hog slaughter; eventually a ravishing crescendo is reached in a nightclub where Poet sells Sister to a businessman while she sways to Beck's "Loser." Three minutes long, the scene is breathtaking.

Combining styleless gravity with some guerrilla camera work and several scenes torn from dreams, Hung's second film approaches greatness before it scatters its force. The gangster picture, for example, never successfully links Hung's panoramas of the rich at play with the poverty-stricken at work.

Not intended to be more than suggestive windows onto other worlds, the frequent distractions hurt and diffuse the film, leaving it finally more like the pooling river behind the house than the modern canvas of the street in front.