Vietnam, the distant and mysterious "Indochina".
This land was once synonymous with "refugees" and "war disasters".
The tragic history has also made this country a special existence in Western movies.
In these films, it is often shown as "damp and hot, lustful, mysterious, and weird"
For example: "Lover", "Indochina", "Deer Hunter", "Field Platoon" and so on...
Along with these Western films, there is the name of an Eastern director, which we cannot ignore - Chen Yingxiong.
Born in Vietnam in 1962, Tan Anh Emig emigrated to France at the age of 14 and settled in Paris to study philosophy.
After stumbling upon a film by a Vietnamese director, he was deeply moved and decided to study film instead.
In 1994, Chen Yingxiong's debut novel "The Taste of Green Papaya" was born, and won the Golden Camera Award at the Cannes Film Festival and the César Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Debut is the peak, Chen Hero became famous in one battle.
In his debut novel "The Taste of Green Papaya", Chen Yingxiong also tried to use freshness to cover up the reality of Vietnam and the cruel life of the people at the bottom.
In the second film, he rips off the fig leaf and shows a vietnam that is wet with lust and full of blood, violence, and darkness.
The movie is "The Tricycle Driver."
"The Tricycle Driver" was released in 1995 and won the Golden Lion Award at the 52nd Venice Film Festival that year.
The main actors are Liang Chaowei, Li Wenlu and Chen Nuyanxi
(Remarks: The heroine Chen Nu Yanxi is Chen Yingxiong's wife).
Liang Chaowei is a magical actor who holds various awards and has cooperated with various directors.
Ang Lee said he was "a talented actor of the director's dreams."
When Hou Xiaoxian was filming "City of Sorrows", in order to cooperate with Liang Chaowei, who could not speak Taiwanese, he deliberately changed the male protagonist Wenqing to a mute.
In "The Tricycle Driver", in order to invite Leung Chao Wai (who does not speak Vietnamese), Chen Yingxiong did not hesitate to cut the male protagonist's lines to almost nothing.
It is said that Chen Yingxiong was first impressed by Liang Chaowei's performance in "City of Sorrows" and then watched Liang Chaowei's videotape for three consecutive days at the Hong Kong Hotel.
Among them, he was impressed by the three-minute performance at the end of Liang Chaowei's "The True Biography of Ah Fei" and identified him as the best candidate for the role of "poet" in "Tricycle Driver".
The "Tricycle Driver" film kicks off in a narration —
"Our family depends on tricycles to survive, every morning we have to work hard, we have to keep stepping on the car to make ends meet, eat and sleep on the street, often have waist pain, sometimes hurt so much that we can't get up, there is no future at all." I am useless in this life, and even if I die, there is nothing left for my children. ”
This is the last words of a father to his son.
Although there is no future in pedaling a tricycle, in order to survive, the 18-year-old Vietnamese teenager still becomes a tricycle driver.
Immediately after, the director explained the family background of the tricycle driver in three words through a simple application for a poor family subsidy:
Both parents died, leaving four people in the family.
Grandpa repairs cars for people in the market, sister goes to class in the morning, works as a shoe shine boy in the afternoon, and sister carries water to the market.
In order to survive, everyone lives every day as if they are fighting, as if they are going to slide into the quagmire of starvation if they slack off a little.
The tricycle driver came out early and returned late every day, desperately pulling the car under the scorching sun.
A long shot of slow pulling as the tricycle driver walks through the streets.
Dilapidated and decadent streets, indifferent people, chaotic social order, a panoramic picture of post-war Vietnam is revealed.
The money earned by the tricycle driver also had to be paid to the hostess, because his tricycle was rented by the hostess.
Every day, the lady boss put her arms around her mentally handicapped son and watched from high as the tricycle driver crawled in front of her like a dog, handing over his hard-earned money.
The lives of the poor are feared every day.
Because of the pulling of the car across the boundary, the tricycle driver was almost beaten. The lady boss also designed and snatched the tricycle in order to pull the tricycle into the underworld for her own benefit.
In this way, the eighteen-year-old tricycle driver gradually slid into the hell of human nature in order to redeem himself from the underworld.
The poet played by Liang Chaowei appeared at this time.
His identity is complicated: the leader of the society, the lover of the lady boss...
The poet leads two members and directs the tricycle driver to burn the granary, burn the competitors' car shops, transport drugs, shoot and kill...
From the immaturity of burning the granary, to the indifference and determination when making bombs, to the viciousness of the enemy, the rapid degeneration of the tricycle driver is chilling.
He began to take drugs, began to enjoy the knife in his hand, began to stroke the large amount of money he got after each completion of the task, and began to enjoy this bloodthirsty life on the tip of the knife.
At the same time, the poet was a pimp.
The tricycle driver's sister was forced to become a prostitute by life, and the poet was responsible for soliciting customers for her sister, and the customers she pulled were completely perverted.
Strangely enough, the poet and his sister fell in love.
However, the poet still pushes his sister to a different man, and still maintains a close relationship with the boss lady.
Of course, the poet will also gently wash his sister's hair, will take her to see her parents, and will look at her with affection.
The characters in "The Tricycle Driver" are so lonely, determined, and silent.
Violence is everywhere in the film, and it often breaks out and ends suddenly. This silence makes loneliness more and more lonely, cruelty more cruel, despair more desperate.
The tricycle driver and the poet, neither man lived the life his fathers had hoped for, but was instead trapped in depravity and sin.
But there seems to be a glimmer of hope in this boundless despair.
The tricycle driver, who woke up in the middle of the night, suddenly remembered his father's advice, so he suddenly woke up.
He exclaimed:
"Father, you sacrificed yourself to save me / This morning, I feel extremely peaceful / As if living in your body / Living in your silhouette, steps and demeanor, the rugged fingers, the rough hands, is it yours or mine, my arm bend feels the joints of your muscles / Your skin is burned rough / After years of resistance to the heat and cold / You have changed your blood veins for the path of life, and now I suddenly realize." 」
He longed to return to his normal life, to continue his life as a tricycle driver, when hard work was hard work, poverty was poor, but every penny came from the right place.
The pained tricycle driver, delirious after taking drugs, like the mentally handicapped son of the lady boss, painted blue paint all over his body and did not complete the murderous task.
The boss lady's son was killed in a car accident, and the boss lady whose conscience found out released the tricycle driver to live.
On the other side, the poet looks at her sexually abused sister and can't stand it anymore.
He was silent, stabbing the prostitute's body with one knife after another, and when the prostitute was dying, he shoved six hundred dollars into his mouth.
In the end, the poet burned the brothel with a large fire and buried himself in the sea of fire.
"The Tricycle Driver" has an oriental view of fatalism:
The body and mind of the tricycle driver and the father merge in one "death"; the son of the lady boss is painted with red paint and atones for his mother's sins with death; the poet, after killing the prostitute, burns the sin with a fire...
So, when a new morning came, we followed the camera to see a family of four sitting in a tricycle driver's car, in the sun through the chaotic streets of Vietnam.
The camera moves over the ruins of the wall, to the hero statue in the square, to the pool on the tennis court, to the children singing in the classroom.
The sun was shining, as if everything was getting better, and there was hope for everything.
The voiceover sounded: suffocating heat waves, sweltering afternoons, withered starfruit emitting a stench, I curled up, in the rain.
Fried fish, cereal porridge, lemon leaves, grapefruit peel, milky white water washed my brown skin.
Underneath these sentences, there is hope.
The plot of "The Tricycle Driver" is very stream-of-consciousness, like a poem, a song, lingering sadness, bitterness and sorrow.
We don't know the names of those characters, how my sister became a prostitute, or what the boss lady called the past.
These settings, which lack antecedents and consequences, always seem to present an outcome rather than a cause.
Life is like this, living a life has become like this, exhausting a lifetime can only be confused. So the best way is not to look for the reason, ask is the fate of the trick.
This stream-of-consciousness film text is accompanied by several beautiful pieces of music.
For example, when the poet solicits a guest for his sister in a bar, and the sister twists her body seductively, the soundtrack is Radiohead's "CREEP".
The seemingly light music suppresses deep sorrow and pain, which complements Liang Chaowei's restrained acting skills.
The use of light in the film has the magnificence and boldness of Bertolucci: golden noon, indigo cold morning and dusk, miserable green room, big red blood, blue suffocating paint...
Novel-like narratives, oil-painting-like scenes, low-pitched singing, silent performances, agile shots, all of which resemble a dancing girl twisting her body, expecting the gaze of the audience (the prostitute).
In "The Tricycle Driver", Chen Yingxiong narrates a post-war Vietnam full of sin and chaos with compassion, transcendent vision and poetic lens language, unveiling the unspeakable scars of the Vietnamese and continuing his ambivalent feelings of "deep love, reflection and reconstruction" for his homeland Vietnam.
It is worth mentioning that none of the characters in the film have specific names, so we can also see them as representatives of the lower people of Vietnam.
Does Vietnam and the Vietnamese people in The lens of Chen Yingxiong really have a way out?
Is there really any residual goodwill underneath those sins? In those despairs, is there really a glimmer of hope?
When Chen Yingxiong chose to end the story of "Tricycle Driver" with a dreamy ending, perhaps he had already given the answer in hesitation and contradiction.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
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