A
La Verticale De L'Eté
is the third film by Tran Anh Hung,
the Indonesian-born, French-trained director of The
Scent Of Green Papaya (1993) and Cyclo
(1995), both widely garlanded and internationally distributed.
The new film's been described by Unifrance as "a lively,
sensual, poignant and sometimes roguish comedy" which features
three apparently mild women who bring an underlying violence
and passion to the film.
Set
in modern Hanoi, A La Verticale De L'Eté
tells the story of Lien (Tran Nu Yen Khe), a 23-year-old
waitress in the café run by her older sister Suong
(Nguyen Nhu Quynh), who shares an apartment with her older
brother Hai (Ngo Quang Hai), an actor. On the anniversary
of their mother's death, Lien, Suong, Hai and their youngest
sister
Khanh dine together. But what secrets do these seemingly
close offspring hide?
"The three sisters cultivate an idealised model of their
parents," the director explains. "When the anniversary of
their mother's death threatens their memory of the perfect
couple, the sisters get together to make up a story that
preserves the harmony they associate with their parents'
lives." This idea of a shared imagined reality the
family as hallucination was worked into the director's
visual conception of the film. "The images of the film are
not documentary, nor are they 'the present' as experienced
by the characters," he says. "Rather, they are images
which exist in their collective consciousness that they
will keep secretly and that evoke harmonious memories for
them."
Tran Anh Hung says that his first visit to Hanoi was inspirational.
"While I was immersed in the chaos of shooting Cyclo
[in Saigon] I detected the possibility of harmony in Hanoi,"
he recalls. "From this first encounter I was struck by the
qualities that the capital has, its very particular sensuality
and intimacy." It's
a quality that appears to be even physically part of the
fabric of the city. "The materials that are used in partition
walls in Hanoi allow you to hear and see the life that surrounds
you," he says. In the film, this impression
of everybody's lives overlapping is knitted into the everyday
environment. "The intimacies and secrets of each character
are part of the day-to-day business of living," comments
the director.
It seems that his cast also fell into the spirit of things,
with an actress claiming that her role had come to resemble
her own life too closely for comfort. "Fiction flirted
with reality," the director says of the shoot. "Each performer
found resonances between their own lives and the film."
Chris
Darke
