SUN AND SAND

by Chris Dashiell

It's a commonplace that films tell stories with images. For some filmmakers, though, the images are the story - the tale and all the feelings it evokes transmitted directly (it seems) from image to eye to heart, with words running behind as a kind of accompaniment to the main theme. Most of the time, you have to get in the mood for that kind of film. Then there are special cases - Tran Anh Hung's Vertical Ray of the Sun is one of them - where the movie takes you there whether you're in the mood or not.

The picture opens with a young man and woman waking up in separate beds, languidly yawning and stretching, while a song by The Velvet Underground is playing on the stereo. They are brother and sister, their relationship - with its gentle teasing and physical closeness - comes near to being incestuous without actually going there. They attend their family's memorial meal for their recently deceased mother. There we meet two other siblings - sisters - and their husbands. Gradually, without too much expository help, we learn that they live in Hanoi, that the two elder sisters are married to a photographer and a writer respectively, and that the surface of domestic calm conceals sorrows and infidelities.

Hung and his cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-Bin, attain a wondrous delicacy of vision. The objects that make up the characters' world - houses, foliage, the city streets, the colors themselves - are so vivid, it's as if you could almost touch them. The composition of the figures in the frame creates the effect of a serene eye - the artist as watcher - and the mood is therefore one of acceptance, a sort of acquiescence in beauty, rather than agitaton. It took a little while for my mind to adjust to this style. When I did it was like being able to relax into a story, with the characters and their secrets and emotions as a part of the landscape, aspects of nature.

Love, disappointment, and infidelity are the main themes. The three sisters are at the center. Suong (Nguyen Nhu Quynh) has recently had a baby boy, but she's also cheating on her husband (the photographer), who in turn has his own secret life. Khanh (Le Khanh) is pregnant, her husband (the writer) can't finish his novel, and a trip to Saigon will test his faithfulness. Lien (Tran Nu Yên-Khê), the youngest, is an impish free spirit whose worldly manner is coupled with naiveté. The film moves ever so softly between stories, with a fine eye for the details of daily life.

The best analogy for the mood of Vertical Ray of the Sun is the pleasantly drowsy state between sleeping and waking when you're not quite ready to get out of bed. In fact, I can't recall another film that so deliberately emphasizes sleep as an element of life. The brother and sister waking up to Lou Reed is a recurring scene with variations. All the characters are seen napping, or talking in bed, or lying asleep in each other's arms, at one time or another during the picture. It's a clever device, but it's more than that. It's a direct expression of Hung's stylistic method - wrapping the story in a blanket of natural serenity. We suffer and struggle, the film seems to say, but surrounding all this, usually unbeknownst to us, is peace - symbolized by sleep, that necessary third of our life where we just rest.

I haven't seen Hung's other films, but on the evidence of this one I'd say that character and dialogue are not his strengths. Nothing in the script is especially jarring or out of place, but the carefulness of Hung's focus on the physical world and its beauty can make the people seem less than vital. In another film, that could be a serious flaw. In this one, it seems just the effect that was called for. I went into this picture in the wrong frame of mind - nervous and impatient. It won me over - calmed me down like a sweet lullabye.

There's an overt mystery in François Ozon's Under the Sand - Marie (Charlotte Rampling) has apparently lost her husband - he went swimming and disappeared. But no body was found. What has happened to him? Is he really dead? Most of the time, Marie doesn't seem to think so. She acts and talks as if he's still alive, still living with her, much to the consternation of her friends.

The film's covert mystery is - what is really going on inside Marie? It is a measure of the film's sophistication that we can easily lose the thread of this more subtle mystery, or jump to conclusions that make us think we know the answer. At first I thought the movie was about the incredible force of denial. Marie can't, won't get past the denial stage of grief. And this power she has, the power of denial, is not looked down upon by Ozon, but is in itself a deeper sort of humanity than facile acceptance. It is noble, if you will, noble even in its quality of lostness and delusion.

This is all true - partly. But by interpreting Under the Sand this way, I think I practiced a little bit of denial myself. The film goes deeper than that. The great thing about it is that it doesn't try to argue a point of view - it gives you the time to either see deeper or not, to come to conclusions or not. A friend of mine couldn't get to sleep after seeing it. She kept turning certain details over in her mind. It's that kind of movie. I won't say any more about the mystery than this because I don't want to spoil it for those who are willing to pay close attention (even to toss and turn over it). I will say that I think the picture explores the idea of intimacy as attention, as paying attention to one another in a heightened way. It also has things to say about mortality, not in terms of the dead but of the consciousness of mortality in the living, and how it affects the way we live.

Ozon employs a spare, ascetic style. Even in scenes that inspire reverie - I'm thinking especially of a fantasy in which Marie is caressed by two pairs of imaginary male hands - his presentation is austere. This fits, I think, the mood of the piece very well. He trusts in Rampling to carry the story, and carry it she does, in style. When Marie is living in the conviction that her husband is still with her, Rampling is intense, vivacious, and a little scary. When Marie is confronted with her aloneness, Rampling seems weary, older, shrunk within herself. It's a versatile performance, multi-layered, strange and stirring.

To call Under the Sand a difficult film is to risk turning people away from it. I'm only tempted to call it that because it studiously avoids guiding the audience in a familiar direction. In a formal sense, it is simplicity itself. But it's the way it uses its story to ask questions without actually asking them out loud, that makes the film a challenge. To engage with it, you need to question yourself.

©2001 Chris Dashiell
CineScene