The Vertical Ray of the Sun (PG) | Screening 3 - Saturday 4 May at 11:15 am |
David Stratton (The Weekend Australian) Tran Anh Hung is the best-known Vietnamese director on the international film scene, though he's lived most of his life in Paris. His first film, the exquisite The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), was set in a 1950s Saigon completely recreated in a French film studio, but he returned to the place of his birth to make the abrasive Cyclo (1995) on location in what is now called Ho Chi Minh City. These two films provided utterly different views of Vietnam: the first, a nostalgic examination of a peaceful, well-ordered life before the war; the second, an apocalyptic postwar vision of violence and destruction. For his third film, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, Tran has made his first film set in Hanoi. It's a contemporary piece about the lives of three sisters but it's also a beautifully filmed meditation on the very human need to keep up appearances. Delicate and simple in the best senses of those words, the film may be very specifically Vietnamese in its detail but, like the best movies from any source, its characters and themes have universal application. It's the fact that these characters and their concerns are so recognisable that makes the film so touching and memorable.
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