Amazon.com video review:
The city was once named Saigon; it is now
called Ho Chi Minh City, and in this powerful second feature by
Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya)
it looks like a lost circle of hell.
Cyclo is a survey of a society in decay, in which conventional
plotting gives way to a series of enigmatic episodes and haunting
observations. There are two main characters: Cyclo (Le Van Loc) is a
poor urban teenager who scratches out a living operating a bicycle
taxi in the murderous city traffic; the Poet (Hong Kong star Tony
Leung) is the son of an upper-class family who has depressively
drifted into pimping and fencing--wartime rackets still thriving in
the new Vietnam.
Images of appalling violence are played against backgrounds of banal,
everyday bustle--a buzzing flow of meaningless, insectlike activity.
Hung's vision may be dispiritingly bleak, but his filmmaking is vivid and
inventive. Each shot is distinguished by a particular quality of lighting,
framing, or texture that lifts it out of the ordinary and into the realm of
the strange, ravishing, and insinuating. --Dave Kehr
