The Vertical Ray of the Sun

Anh Hung Tran has created an elegant, beautiful motion picture with 2000’s The Vertical Ray of the Sun. It is a deeply lyrical film, brimming with colour and vibrancy like his 1993 piece The Scent of Green Papaya. Tran creates movies that have a distinct sensuality and mood; they almost ease across the screen unlike anything you’ve ever seen yet feel wholly familiar. For those interested, Tran has two new films coming up: I Come with the Rain starring Josh Hartnett and Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood due in 2010.

In many ways, The Vertical Ray of the Sun is a poem bathed in the language of motion pictures. Tran takes his time with every single shot, giving us the sensuality of Vietnam while packaging a rather complex set of romantic entanglements beneath the surface. The results are stunning. I have seen his film twice now. The first time was about five years ago and I was simply hypnotized by the cinematography and tone. The second time, last night, I dug deeper into the woven stories and was stunned by how much complexity there is beneath the surface.

The Vertical Ray of the Sun deals with three sisters and follows them through their multipart romantic relationships and their daily existence in Hanoi. Lien (Tran Nu Yên-Khê), Suong (Nhu Quynh Nguyen), and Khanh (Le Khanh) are the sisters. Two of the sisters, Suong and Khanh, are married. Lien is single and lives at home with her twin brother, Hai (Ngo Quang Hai). They have an interesting relationship and chase each other around the house in a flirtatious fashion. Lien often jokes about they are mistaken as a couple frequently.

Tran has structured his film to take place over the span of a year, roughly. We begin and end as the sisters are preparing for the memorial celebration for their mother. The other sisters live out their lives between the two celebrations, with Suong married to a photographer with a distressing secret and Khanh discovering that she is pregnant.

But it isn’t the events that drive The Vertical Ray of the Sun. It is, instead, Tran’s discussion and interpretation of the events as luminous visual moments. When Khanh announces her pregnancy, it is done with pauses, slight shyness, and loveliness. When Lien wakes in the morning and stretches, it is presented with beauty, tenderness, and love. As music plays throughout Lien and Hai’s space, we are enchanted at the greenness and gorgeousness of the world they wake up to each day.

Tran’s Vietnam is lush and exotic. The food, the plants, the sounds, the rain, and the environment are all presented with splendour and grace. Life is simple, so it seems, but Tran betrays us with a deeper story beneath the minimalism and draws us in to demonstrate that life has similar currents regardless of the culture. We all have our deceptions, our secrets, and our passions. And Tran further demonstrates this by allowing the events to unfold at the natural speed of life, not the imagined rushed event-to-event structure that so much of Hollywood abides by.

In taking his time with the beauty of the art form, Tran has created a motion picture that is lovely to look at and, upon further examination, becomes complex and quite exciting. The Vertical Ray of the Sun unfolds like a flower in bloom, slowly drawing us in to the deeper complexities of colour and smell.

Trailer: