Cyclo (Xich-Lo)

By JAYNE MARGETTS

FOR many directors, traversing the line between violence and tenderness can be a lifetime ambition. Martin Scorsese has made a reputation out of it while Alfred Hitchcock chose to submerge both his actors and his audience into the realms of emotional and fear-based violence. But for one director of French/Vietnamese extraction Tran Anh Hung - he has achieved almost the impossible by sucking us into the cranial battlefields of a young Vietnamese boy caught up in his own initiation into the seedy criminal underworld in modern day Ho Chi Minh city and a gradual descent into the pits of hell.

Cyclo, the title of Anh Hung's second tome and labour of love, is not a film for the faint-hearted. Visceral and tormented it is an acknowledgment and statement that speaks as much of a generation as it does a race of people, while recreating the primal nuances of concrete, fatigue, sweat, blood, innocence and corruption that holds Vietnam's population to ransom.

The usual plethora of films based in Vietnam's exotic climes depict wars fought in the impenetrable jungles, but where Hung is concerned this is also a place that also takes its young and breaks them physically and emotionally while leaving them to walk a tightrope edge of insanity.

Anh Hung - even with the aid of a translator - in person and in essence has a largeness of spirit that burns as brightly as any of the characters who walk through his cathartic canvas', and when he remembers the feelings that assaulted him when he saw the film in it's full blown beauty and ugliness he sees the skinny frame of actor Le Van Loc hovering between the dark and the light.

"This actor brought his body, his face, what he had lived before," he recollects. "A man who had lived and was a real worker, and, in fact I chose this man and I know his contribution was absolutely extraordinary to the story and character that I had created.

"I needed a character that was both innocent and hard. Innocent because he's young. Hard because life is very, very tough. It took me three months to get him, and he brought in essence both his experience and his humanity to this character. I needed a body that was not that yet of a man, therefore quite fragile and quite slim, but that was already bent and broken from the work."

For Anh Hung, whose previous works the shorts, La Femme Mariee De Nam Xuong, La Pierre De L'Attente and latterly his full length debut feature The Scent Of Green Papaya which won Le Camera d'Or Cannes, 1993, Caesar Best First Film, 1994 and Oscar Nominee, Best Foreign Film, 1994, Cyclo also questions the bond between a father and son.

" The Scent Of Green Papaya gave me the opportunity to go back to Vietnam. I wanted to shoot the film there. When I arrived in Ho Chi Minh city in 1991 to scout for locations, I was overwhelmed by a purely physical feeling - of the rhythm emanating from the city, of the incredible weariness of its inhabitants - a sort of exhaustion.

"Two years on, the feeling was still there, as intense as ever. And secretly, it mingled with a question that had been running through my head for a long time: what is the nature of the tie that binds a child to his father? That gave me the essentials: that vital sensation and the theme."

For casual spectators and critics alike, Cyclo has had a deeply profound effect on their emotions and psyche, and awards such as Winner Golden Lion Best Film Venice Festival, 1995, Winner International Critics Prize Venice Film Festival and Grand Prize 22nd Film Festival of Flanders, 1995, have only confirmed the films' sheer power and potency.

"With distance and time, the film really has actually fulfilled what I wanted in that I went to Vietnam and it was like a flash of emotional explosions," he concludes.

Cyclo, like its director Tran Anh Hung has the marking of genius. Flawed, passionate and brutal, it is the bittersweet odyssey of violence intermingled with tenderness of a man and boy caught between the very veils of life and death.