Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung's award-winning follow-up to his Oscar-nominated and much praised debut The Scent Of Green Papaya is something of a major departure as it tells the tale of three individuals trapped in appalling poverty in modern Ho Chi Minh City.
At first the action revolves around an 18-year-old young man named only the Cyclo (Nu Yen Khe) who picks up where his recently-killed father left off, by scouring the streets for business with his bicycle-taxi. When a vicious band of youths beat him and steal the vehicle he has been renting, the Cyclo is obliged to embark on a life of crime. He becomes part of his patron's gang of heavies in order to pay back his debt, and is installed by gang leader the Poet (Leung-Chiu Wai) in a seedy squat. Once he has established the fact that the boy's innocence is in peril, Hung shifts sideways to focus on the Poet, who we learn is pimping out the Cyclo's elder sister, but does not know they are related.
Although the acting is superbly expressive throughout, the rest of the action unravels rather scrappily. In particular, the film's structure is very convoluted, forcing Western audiences to rely on intuition and let symbolism guide them through the alien landscape. Hung tells his story largely without words, with the result that we spend most of the film engaged in people-watching, and are ignorant of the characters' precise motivations.
Lastly, this is not a film for the faint-hearted: the violence is often so concentrated and fierce that watching is actually unpleasant. Quite apart from human deaths by car accidents, stabbings and burnings, the cruelty on display against goldfish, lizards and pigs is truly vile and shocking.