[news] Tran Anh Hung shoots first film in Hanoi

[Dam Thanh Son <son@ctp.mit.edu>]

HANOI, Aug 23 (AFP) - More than four years after the release of the highly
acclaimed and controversial film "Cyclo", Vietnamese-French director Tran
Anh Hung has just completed shooting his first ever film in Hanoi. 

That Hung was able to make "A la verticale de l'ete" (Summer Vertical) in
the Communist capital at all is a tribute to his skills of persuasion. 

The release of "Cyclo," which won the Lion d'or at the Venice film
festival in 1995, provoked a barrage of official criticism for its intense
and surreal depiction of poverty and crime in contemporary Ho Chi Minh
City and it has never been shown in Vietnam. 

"There was a misunderstanding between my cinema and the people here. They
thought the violence distorted Vietnam's image. It was difficult to get
permission to shoot again," Hung said in an interview with AFP. 

It is hard to reconcile the soft spoken, 36-year-old Hung with some of the
brutal images he created in "Cyclo." But it is easy to imagine him as the
man who also produced the highly sensual "The Scent of Green Papaya." 

With his close-cropped hair and prominent ears that become translucent in
the sun, and a benign intensity, one might easily mistake him for a
buddhist novice out of his robes. 

No doubt his gentle manner helped him during the nine months it took to
convince Hanoi's cultural commissars his films contained neither
"political discourse nor morality," finally enabling him to start shooting
in May. 

But throughout the 62-day shoot, a censor from the Ministry of Culture and
Information stayed on the set to make sure the filming didn't deviate from
the approved screenplay. 

"One cannot work without a censor and I want to continue to do things
here," he added. 

He has succeeded where others have not. A Hollywood production of James
Bond was forced to scrap its plans to film here in 1997 because early Bond
films had pitted Agent 007 against communist adversaries. 

Hung says his film, with a modest 4.8 million dollar budget, is a simple
story about "relations between men and women, dealing mostly with notions
of happiness, fidelity and infidelity." It spans one month in the summer
of a contemporary middleclass Hanoi family of three sisters and a brother. 

"I'm not a filmmaker who likes lots of events, but everything in the film
should result in producing a sensation of fragility that floats," he says
gazing out onto the street in Hanoi's colonial French quarter. 

"It is something you cannot possess but are always aware of, I wanted to
reproduce this feeling when I came to Hanoi, a quality of intimacy you see
everywhere," he added. 

But while Hung adores the nonchalance of Hanoi where so much of daily life
spills out onto the streets, he says "Summer Vertical" is equally
influenced by the works of artists Rothko and Rauschenberg and Japanese
filmmakers Akiro Kurusawa and Yasujiro Ozu. 

In that regard his latest oeuvre will be reminiscent of richly textured
and nostalgic "The Scent of Green Papaya," Hung's first feature which
earned him an academy award nomination for best foreign film in 1993. 

Hung's wife, Vietnamese-French actress Tran Nu Yen Khe, who starred in
"Cyclo" and "Papaya", plays the youngest of the three sisters in his
newest film, which also features famous local actresses Nhu Quynh and Le
Khanh. 

All the other actors are local Vietnamese, except for Hung, who gives a
slightly comic performance of an overseas Vietnamese filmmaker. 

But the real life filmmaker Hung is serious about coming back to Hanoi
when post-production on the movie is finished. 

"I hope I can show the film here," he says.