Tran Anh Hung re-locates to Hanoi, by all appearances a sleepier burg than the Saigon of his previous films, The Scent of Green Papaya and especially Cyclo. The action, to use the term loosely, centers around three grown sisters (thoughts of Chekhov begin to form) and the several men in their lives. Relationships are in some cases a little slow to come clear, and there is not much in the way of narrative incident to propel momentum: just a series of moments strung between two family milestones a month apart, the anniversary of the mother's death and the anniversary of the father's. A mystique of perfection, a veritable legend, now surrounds the memory of the parents' lives together, a standard against which to measure the lives of the offspring: the secret affairs, double lives, unfulfilled longings. The emerging theme would seem to have to do with the imperfection of life as a rule: imperfection, that is, except in fleeting moments, brief snippets from the time-line, frozen photographs for the memory album. The movie immediately immerses us in another place, another tempo. Its opening scene -- of a sister and brother slowly waking up and going through their morning routines of stretching, pull-ups, tai chi -- draws us into a far-away fictional world as deeply and as magically as any descent down a rabbit hole or any forward leap in a time machine. This and countless other moments of comparable size are played out without haste and without impatience. They are the opposite of the greased-pig moments that Hollywood dispenses in mortal terror of tranquility, repose, focus, and other such natural enemies of mindlessness and soullessness. They cultivate the art of noticing and appreciating. The filmmaker holds on to them, as the saying goes, for dear life. And the artful cinematography by Mark Lee Ping-Bin -- the observant and appreciative cinematography -- is as much the "point" of the film as is any larger "theme." Tran Nu Yen-Khe, Nguyen Nhu Quynh, Le Khanh. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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