Some of the admirers of Tran Anh Hung's Scent of Green Papaya, if not properly forewarned, might feel a little betrayed by the rawness of his second effort (the title refers either to the Vietnamese bicycle taxi or to its driver) as against the rarefaction of his first one. Nor are they apt to be much mollified by the tableau of three prostitutes snacking on a papaya after a girlishly giggly waterfight. But the rawness is in the content only, not in the treatment. This is a vision of Saigon après la guerre, or in other words a vision of Ho Chi Minh City, in startling contrast to the untouched enclave explored previously. And still in contrast, it goes for breadth of vision in place of depth. (A gory knife murder will be juxtaposed with an elementary-school singalong.) But possibly not so dissimilar to Scent after all, Cyclo parcels out meticulous documentation of a way of life, a stratum of life, albeit a way and a stratum more in line with what the newspaper reader might expect of a portrait of Vietnam, a Vietnam much more familiar to the informed foreigner: poverty, violence, crime, prostitution. Even more familiar to the foreigner, whether or not a newspaper reader, will be the generic elements: the corruption of the innocent (the crime victim who imagines he would be better off among the criminals, the sister forced into prostitution) and the innocence of the corrupt (the tragic, nostalgic, melancholic gangster, knowingly played by Hong Kong action star Tony Leung, with his ever-present cigarette and his intermittent nosebleed). The imaginative arrangement of these elements against an exotic backdrop removes them a small step from familiarity. The documentary part of the movie in effect freshens the generic part, and vice versa. Le Van Loc, Tran Nu Yen Khe. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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