Xích lô

Plot synopsis:
The movie is about an 18-year-old boy who has been orphaned after his father died from a truck crash while he was in his usual work. The father was a cyclo driver, and his desire was the son would have a better life than he had. However, after the father’s death, because of the family hardship, the boy has to take over the father’s job, pedaling a rental cyclo around busy streets of Sai Gon city to earn a living. Living with the boy in a small house, there are his old grandfather, who repairs tires despite of his failing health, his little sister, who shines shoes for restaurant customers in the neighborhood, and his older sister, who carries water at a local market.
Their poor but peaceful lives are jeopardized when the cyclo is stolen by a gang. Having no money to pay for the robbed cyclo, the boy is forced to join a criminal organization and is under the supervision of a brooding gang leader, who is also a poet.
Meanwhile, his older sister also comes under the influence of the poet and becomes a prostitute. They develop feelings for each other. She visits his house where he is beaten by his father, who is furious for the profession he has taken. The poet brings the cyclo driver to Mr. Lullaby, who kills a victim by slitting his throat while singing a lullaby.
Ho Chi Minh City is hit by unrest as different gangs start fighting with each other. A truck carrying a helicopter crashes on a busy city-street. The cyclo driver blinds one eye of the man who stole his cyclo, but manages to remain unseen by anyone. He pays another visit to his lady employer to pay a part of his debt, but she refuses and becomes busy with her retarded son who has covered himself with yellow paint.
The poet assigns the cyclo driver the job of murdering a man. His two accomplices give him a gun and teach him how to kill their intended target. They also hand him a bottle of pills to reduce his anxiety, but warn him not to take too many. The poet and the cyclo driver's sister visit his childhood place. He leaves her in a nightclub with a client and she is abused by the man. Both the poet and the man realize their mistakes and the man tries to compensate by bribing the poet with a hefty sum of money. But the poet kills the man and then kills himself by setting fire to the room where he lives.
Meanwhile, the retarded son of the lady is killed when he is hit by a truck. The cyclo driver gets drunk and takes two tablets of the drug he has received from the poet's accomplices. He becomes hallucinatory in the flat where he has been forced to stay, failing to carry out the job of killing the man. Instead, he covers himself with blue paint and then due to the hallucinations he mistakenly shoots himself twice. The next morning, the members of the gang find him badly injured but still alive, and the lady spares his life despite his failure because he reminds her of her deceased son. She releases him from the gang. The movie ends with the scene of the cyclo driver, still contemplating the memory of his father, driving his cyclo with his grandfather and his two sisters on it through a crowded road of Ho Chi Minh City.

Tags: revenge, murder, violence

Review:
In Tran Anh Hung's 1995 film Cyclo, the cyclo driver is a naïve 18-year old (Le Van Loc) whose innocence is corrupted by the choices he is compelled to make to escape the circle of grinding poverty.
In Cyclo, Tran assaults our senses with the churning swirl of colors and sounds of Ho Chi Minh City, capturing the vibrations of the city with its street markets, pavement cafes, sidewalk vendors, and choking traffic.
Cyclo has little dialogue, mostly gestures and silences, and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme's focus on the underlying beauty of the city gives the film a lyricism that renders the violence ambiguous.
Cyclo has lost both parents and lives in near poverty with his grandfather (Le Kinh Huy), who continues to work fixing bicycle tires despite his failing health.
His younger sister (Phan Ngoc Lieu) earns a living by shining shoes outside of restaurants and the older sister (Tran Nu Yen-Khe) works as a cook and delivery person.
Cyclo's boss (Nguyen Nhu) is known only as the Boss Lady (none of the characters in the film are named) who leads a criminal operation while taking care of her retarded son (Bjuhoang Huy).
When Cyclo's bicycle is stolen by a rival gang, the young man is recruited by the Boss lady and her associate, The Poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a small-time hoodlum and pimp, to work off his debt.
Unknown to Cyclo, the Poet recruits his older sister into prostitution, making her available to men interested in various fetishes while preserving her virginity, presumably out of his own love for her.
Cyclo is disturbing and raw but it is an original work of art, both a brutal and often bizarre look at Saigon's mean streets, and a searing love poem to the city and a young man who finally steps outside the vicious circle to discover himself beyond the chaos..
The fact that the actors do not have names, simply lables, such as "le cyclo," "le poete", and "le grand-pere," seem to reinforce the futileness of life in such conditions.There is a strong undercurrent of frustration in this movie.
Vietnamese Auteur Tran Anh Hung shows how by accident violence becomes dominant in the life of a poor, young worker toiling in the streets of Saigon.
Besides "Cyclo" is also a documentary about the sad daily street life in giant third world cities and the permanent fight to survive..
The film looks and feels like a visual poem, and you can't do anything but be awestricken by the sheer intensity and power of the images and their composition that are expressed towards you.
Tran's film is more collected, even though it can be made a point out of the plot at times being a bit sketchy.The story circles around a young cyclo (played by Le Van Loc), a bicycle taxi driver (pedicab),  his older sister and her lover / ex-lover the local hoodlum, know as the poet ( played by Hong Kong star Tony Leung).
We don't learn any of their real names; even the film credits them as the cyclo, the sister, the poet, the grandfather, the madam etc.
But instead of returning to a normal life, he is pressured by the madam's gang led by the silent gangster the poet, to commit even more violent crimes, on madams behalf.The poet  however, is at the same time living a second life as a pimp, under which guise he recruits the cyclos elder sister (presumably because she and her family need the money).
What Ahn-Hung Tran does is both daring and plausible: breaking new ground and expanding our horizons.As I mentioned, that trying to follow the plot is to miss the point of this film.
But the attention the right detail along with the decision to show consequences of situations instead of action and confrontation makes this a unique insight of human nature.The main characters are all mostly silent throughout the film.
Because the cyclo, his sister and the poet are all in one way or another force to do what they're doing, either by each other or by their environment.
Everything ads to the visual flow of the film.Evoking an incredible atmosphere of chaos, helter-skelter activity that seems to follow no law, the strength of cyclo lies in its imagery.
A magnificent accomplishment in cinematography, there's little new to be found in the film's somewhat muddled story which is told almost exclusively with the camera as Oscar winning director Anh Hung Tran demonstrates mastery over the lens in delivering this tapestry of pictures which captures the beauty and blight of a bustling Vietnamese city.
Not for everyone, "Cyclo" will play best with those who appreciate true artistry in film..
It must be one of the most dramatic portraits of Third World poverty ever put on film.The story of a young man's descent and redemption goes back to 1930s Hollywood and the Italian neo-realists.
The emigre Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran brings a cold, sharp yet loving eye to Saigon and Vietnam.
The camerawork, composition, acting and plot(s) are all absolutely exceptional, the (Vietnamese) cultural aspects about family (father-mother-child) are omni-present (mentioned by redanit, also "the egg"); HCMC is a really captivating,noisy and ugly city in this movie, but Tran Anh Hung also shows the "other side" of Vietnam in his new one, "À la verticale de l'été", again on family and relation.
Tran Anh Hung has created a real masterpiece with Cyclo (Xich-Lo), worth 10 for sure !
"Cyclo" begins with neo-realist naturalism, as a young man struggles day to day driving his cycle taxi in modern day Vietnam.
His father has just died, and after working his entire life as a bike-taxi driver, has nothing to leave his children, but the suggestion that they might find something nobler to do with their lives.
The young man spends his days navigating the alleys and the side streets for the quickest routes and attempting to avoid collisions with other bike taxi drivers who have divided the city into turfs and gangs, of who can pick up customers where.One day his taxi is stolen, and to repay the taxi's owner (a local lady crime boss); he has to take on a series of petty crimes to pay the debt.
His sister(played by the gorgeous Tran Nu Yen-Khe begins a tenuous relationship with the boss of the gang Youth works for, a silent constantly smoking man called "Poet" played by the always excellent Tony Leung.
The first half of the film focuses more on Cyclo getting in over his head with the gang, stealing, transporting drugs,and lighting a rival building on fire with a Molotov cocktail.The second half shows us more of the "Poet" and "the Sister".
There are scenes where he is beaten by his father and collapses into sudden helpless boyhood, and a virtuoso and pivotal scene in a nightclub set to Radiohead's "Creep", in the best tradition of using pop songs to encapsulate not just moment in time (the 90's in which the film is set), but the very heart of a character.
When Yorke sings "what the hell am I doing here?" it might as well be Leong singing it aloud.As Cyclo becomes more fascinated with the power, attention, and adrenalin rush he is getting from the gang, "Poet" becomes more aloof splitting his time between the three girls he pimps, and he the lady crime boss who he serves as soldier and lover(or whore depending on how you look at it).
Vietnamese/French director Ahn Hung Tran delicately weaves us in and out of violence and tranquil beauty, near psychedelic explosions of color and poetic reflections, pimps and corpses and children happily at play.After he commits his first major crime, we see him covered in filth, as he had to escape the police in a river or tunnel.
It's a great visual metaphor for gang violence and corruption and its effect on community life, it just makes everything dirtier and sh*&$ier.By the end of the film, Cyclo does not come to his senses, but implodes on himself, and get's a brief offer to escape the life he bumbled or was forced into (its implied that one of the Lady crime bosses henchman was involved in stealing Cyclo's taxi in the first place.) The crime queen's handicapped son, who is Youth's same age, is a kind of mirror image of him throughout the film; financially privileged to his economic struggle, an eternal child to his forced growing-up, the apple of his mother's eye to the deafening absence of being an orphan.
In psychological terms this is guilty and reflective super-ego (poetic Leung) and impulsive childish Id (overgrown man-child son) on two opposite poles of self-destruction, and Ego sandwiched between the two, clinging to a faint possibility of hope/rationality."Cyclo" is compulsively watchable and despite its experimentations easily accessible.
It's about the coming of age of three characters: a riksja-rider, his sister and a poet/pimp/ganster.
The innocent riksja rider is forced to join a gang, his sister transforms from water-carrier to some sort of geisha (somehow staying virgin), and the poet who "moves" them suffers from a mental crisis.
The story starts out strong then about a third of the way through it hops the track.After that, if you can tell what is going on and above all WHY, you're pretty good--or friends with the author.The government of the People's Republic of Vietnam cooperated in making this film for, I suspect, political reasons.
There are some interesting backgrounds, particularly a short interlude where Poet, played by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, and Sister (Ms. Yen-Khe) escape the filthy and impoverished inner city and spend a day in the countryside.
In Cyclo, the young man, who earns his living and supports his family by driving a rental cyclo (bicycle-taxi), is a child without parents.
In Cyclo, the poet is a child that cannot be accepted by his father.
However, in Cyclo, father (male) symbolizes the history and means where a son comes from.
To Tran, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, and the people in there seem familiar, but are strange, actually.
Maybe this can provide one reason as to why Tran uses the characters to spy on people in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City through the frames of windows or lenses.
Therefore, when she is assaulted, her man, the poet, rages to kill the attacker.The characters in Cyclo do not have a name.
If this film is allegorical of a collective loss of innocence of a nation, those characters reflect and depict Vietnamese situations from the director's point of view.The end of the film shows the young man carrying his grandfather, elder sister and younger sister with a cyclo in a crowded street of Ho Chi Minh City.
The ending scene shows that through all the chaos, the young man finally rediscovers and re-builds himself in the present.
Perhaps to emphasize the fact that these are people who would easily blend into the city's gritty atmosphere and would therefore be eventually inconspicuous, the characters of Cyclo, Tran Anh Hung's foray into Saigon's seedy underworld, have no name.
Merely referred to as the cyclo driver, the poet, the sister, the madam, etc., these characters are merely the paint director and writer Tran uses to create the bigger picture, rather than the pictures themselves.As such, to linearly follow the story's plot is to somehow miss the point since the film is more interested in weaving various story lines to create a brooding picture of Saigon and its impoverished inhabitants.
Set in 1995 in the busy commercial capital of Vietnam, a young man (the cyclo driver, played by Le Van Loc) is barely making ends meet pedaling passengers around the city via a pedicab (or a cyclo) all day.
But when his cyclo is stolen, the cyclo driver turns to the poet (Hong Kong actor Tony Leung) who takes him under his wings, involving him initially in petty crimes and then gradually to major crimes such as murder and illegal drug trafficking.
Meanwhile, the cyclo driver's sister (Tran Nu Yên-Khê) works as a prostitute for the poet, with whom she shares (or shared) a relationship with.More like a visual poetry, the narrative aspect of the film may not appeal to more conventional members of the audience but Tran's masterful creation of a graphic portrayal of the city evokes a visually stunning sense of desperation and decay.
The teen is forced into crime by the woman from whom he rented the bike, and falls in with a gang she operates (lead by Chinese actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, the most familiar actor in the cast).
Where Tsai stresses loneliness in the big city, Tran makes Saigon feel overcrowded and the mood is akin to paranoia..
There is no in-between when it comes to this movie, most UK people have found it too realistic, most foreign ones saw it as a clear depiction of Ho Chi Minh City's decadence and corruption.
In my opinion, this movie has got the merit of showing how things are, and how characters are not so clear-cut in their badness or goodness.
The movie is rather rational structured, as it begins with tough but still normal lives of the main characters.
During this unhappy experience, the two main characters experience how mean can people be to one another and they see how tough can life be, even worse than the way they were used to before, though one was an housekeeper and the other a bike-taxi driver.
As the movie slings to its end, the two wretches are finally redeemed and they both go back to their normal life.
That something is called "the script".We're first introduced to the cyclo driver and his family, and are given a fascinating taste of life in HCM City.
The unbelievability of plot events becomes irritating.My two biggest gripes are the script/story (by the director, Anh Hung Tran, and Trung Binh Nguyen) and the acting by the good/bad guy ("Poet") played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai.
I was longing for more views of HCM City and its life, and fewer interiors peopled with unsympathetic characters.I await a Vietnamese movie with the production values found in this film.
Tran anh Hung films have to be watched with a photographic sensitivity, for it relates to the color and shapes as a medium to express feelings and mood.
As I was watching Xich Lo, with great curiosity as I lived in Ho Chi Minh city for a while, I was caught by this sense of surreality that the movie expresses to and fro.
Add to this Hung's way to break plot rhythm, waving between poetic calm to harsh violence, and you get a movie rather unique in its genre, that I surely enjoyed.
In order to makes ends meet the grandson, only known as "the cyclo" peddles people around on his bicycle/taxi.
If this poverty-level existence was not bad enough, the grandson also owes 200, 000 dongs to a mafia Madame.Things go from bad to worse when the cyclo is stolen and the grandson is imprisoned in a nearby apartment by the Madame's man, played by Tony Leung, who is simply known as the Poet.
Therefore on one end the Poet is making the grandson murder while on the other he makes the sister embody the fantasies of perverts.Cyclo has to be one of the most violent films that I have ever seen.
This Vietnamese film was one of the titles I found listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I didn't know what to expect, but reading more about it, it wasn't what I expected, it made me even more keen to watch it.
Basically in Ho Chi Mihn City, an eighteen-year-old boy (Le Van Loc), who was orphaned following the death of his father, is living in poverty, he takes over his father's job, pedaling a rental cyclo around busy streets of Sai Gon city to earn a living.
Their poor but peaceful lives are jeopardized when the cyclo is stolen by a gang, so with no other way of making money, the cyclo driver joins a criminal organisation, under the supervision of a brooding gang leader, who is also a poet (Tony Leung Chiu Wai).
Meanwhile the older sister is also influenced by the poet, she becomes a prostitute, and they develop feelings for each other.
The cyclo driver is brought by poet to meet Mr. Lullaby (Van Day Nguyen), who kills a victim by slitting their throat while singing a lullaby.
It ends with the cyclo driver, still contemplating the memory of his father, driving his grandfather and his two sisters through a crowded road of Ho Chi Minh City.
Strange, almost surreal film which tells of the very downcast side of Saigon, Vietnam, which is involved in drug running and prostitution.Writer/director Tran Anh Hung paints very real characters who say little yet reveal much just through their actions and reactions.
Cyclo is a French-Vietnamese movie filmed by Tran Anh Hung, the same director of "The Scent of Green Papaya" .
The boss of the gang, the Poet ( a surprising Vietnamese-speaking Tony Leung) will introduce Cyclo's sister ( played by Tran Nu Yên-Khê, the director's wife) to prostitution, provoking Cyclo desire for revenge.
Tran Anh Hung camera work is excellent and so is photography.
There's no doubt on the director's ability; what I not liked is his dark vision of Saigon, maybe influenced by his life experiences.
Tran Anh Hung, born in south Vietnam, emigrated in Paris at the end of the war when he was 12 and became a French citizen.
I saw this movie for the first time with my Vietnamese girlfriend (from Saigon of course), and she not liked it for these reasons.
But apart these personal considerations on its verisimilitude, Cyclo is a great movie, maybe a little bit difficult for a mainstream public, but my advice is to take a look.