Starring: Hoang Phuc Nguyen, Le Van Loc, Nhu Quynh
Nguyen
The city was once named Saigon; it is now called
Ho Chi Minh City, and in this powerful second feature by Vietnamese
director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) it looks like a lost
circle of hell.
Cyclo is a survey of a society in decay, in which
conventional plotting gives way to a series of enigmatic episodes and
haunting observations. There are two main characters: Cyclo (Le Van Loc)
is a poor urban teenager who scratches out a living operating a bicycle
taxi in the murderous city traffic; the Poet (Hong Kong star Tony Leung)
is the son of an upper-class family who has depressively drifted into
pimping and fencing--wartime rackets still thriving in the new Vietnam.
Images of appalling violence are played against
backgrounds of banal, everyday bustle--a buzzing flow of meaningless,
insectlike activity. Hung's vision may be dispiritingly bleak, but his
filmmaking is vivid and inventive. Each shot is distinguished by a
particular quality of lighting, framing, or texture that lifts it out of
the ordinary and into the realm of the strange, ravishing, and
insinuating.
DVD:
List Price: US $19.95
Sale
Price: US$9.95
Language:
Cantonese / Mandarin
Subtitle:
English / Traditional Chinese / Simplified Chinese
Regions Free
Letter Box, Dolby Digital 5.1
Rating:
IIB
- "Adult Material;
Parental Guidance Recommended" (roughly equal to an
MPPA rating of "R") Films rated Category IIB
contain large amounts of violence and/or nudity and
sexual situations in addition to possible explicit
language and adult situations.