The Vertical Ray of the Sun is Trần Anh Hùng’s Hanoi chamber piece, a film in which family intimacy is both refuge and camouflage. Three sisters—Liên, Sương, and Khánh—gather around rituals of remembrance for their parents and move through a summer of meals, work, marriages, flirtation, pregnancy, and secrets. The film’s surface is exceptionally calm: humid rooms, green light, music, morning routines, food, plants, and languid conversation. Beneath that composure, relationships are shifting. Infidelity, concealed desire, uncertainty about parentage, and the possibility that the sisters never fully knew their parents disturb the family’s self-image without destroying its affection. Trần’s interest is not exposure for its own sake. He observes how people continue loving one another while withholding information, and how family harmony can depend on what is not spoken. The title suggests a precise instant of light, and the movie often feels organized around similarly fleeting states—summer heat, half-awake bodies, a song in a room, a meal before a revelation. Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s cinematography gives Hanoi a saturated, floating quality that is sensual without becoming tourist imagery. The result is one of Trần’s most relaxed films and one of his most quietly unsettling, because its beauty never guarantees emotional transparency.
Vibe
Synopsis
Three sisters in Hanoi gather for the anniversary of their mother’s death, one of the family rituals that keeps them close. Liên, the youngest, lives with her brother and moves through a playful, intimate daily routine. Sương and Khánh are married, but both households contain secrets and uncertainties that gradually surface. Memories of the sisters’ parents—whose death anniversaries fall close together—also raise questions about a mysterious man connected to their mother’s past. Over the course of a humid summer, pregnancies, affairs, jealousy, and private longing complicate the family’s sense of stability. The film follows these shifts without forcing a single explosive confrontation, allowing affection and deception to coexist.
The Vertical Ray of the Sun is Trần Anh Hùng’s Hanoi chamber piece, a film in which family intimacy is both refuge and camouflage. Three sisters—Liên, Sương, and Khánh—gather around rituals of remembrance for their parents and move through a summer of meals, work, marriages, flirtation, pregnancy, and secrets. The film’s surface is exceptionally calm: humid rooms, green light, music, morning routines, food, plants, and languid conversation. Beneath that composure, relationships are shifting. Infidelity, concealed desire, uncertainty about parentage, and the possibility that the sisters never fully knew their parents disturb the family’s self-image without destroying its affection. Trần’s interest is not exposure for its own sake. He observes how people continue loving one another while withholding information, and how family harmony can depend on what is not spoken. The title suggests a precise instant of light, and the movie often feels organized around similarly fleeting states—summer heat, half-awake bodies, a song in a room, a meal before a revelation. Mark Lee Ping-Bing’s cinematography gives Hanoi a saturated, floating quality that is sensual without becoming tourist imagery. The result is one of Trần’s most relaxed films and one of his most quietly unsettling, because its beauty never guarantees emotional transparency.
Watch for
- Watch the sisters’ meals and memorial gatherings as choreographed family spaces where affection feels effortless even while secrets are accumulating outside the room.
- Notice the morning scenes involving Liên and her brother; their physical ease and teasing rhythm establish a domestic intimacy that the film lets remain suggestive and unresolved.
- Pay attention to green light, curtains, water, plants, and open windows; the cinematography turns summer atmosphere into a visual equivalent of emotional permeability.
- Listen to the mixture of Vietnamese music and Western songs, including the way recorded music creates private emotional zones that dialogue does not fully articulate.
Production notes
The Vertical Ray of the Sun was released in 2000 and returned Trần Anh Hùng to location filmmaking in Vietnam after Cyclo. Sony Pictures’ official page describes the film as a story of three sisters in modern Hanoi, while Cannes records it in the 2000 Un Certain Regard selection. The cinematography is by Mark Lee Ping-Bing, whose work with filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien made him especially suited to Trần’s preference for available light, slow camera movement, and richly layered interiors. Roger Ebert’s review notes that although the movie was filmed in Hanoi, Trần stylizes the city as deliberately as he had stylized the Paris-built Saigon of The Scent of Green Papaya; location realism is therefore transformed by art direction and framing rather than simply observed. The soundtrack juxtaposes composer Tôn-Thất Tiết with recorded Western music, contributing to the film’s cosmopolitan domestic world. The production belongs to Trần’s recurring collaboration with Trần Nữ Yên Khê, who appears as Liên. Its international financing and distribution helped the film circulate widely while preserving Vietnamese language, family ritual, and Hanoi-specific atmosphere.
Trivia
- The film screened in Un Certain Regard at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, extending Trần Anh Hùng’s long relationship with major European festival circuits.
- Cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing gives the Hanoi interiors their soft, humid visual character and was already renowned for his work in Taiwanese art cinema.
- Sony’s current catalogue identifies the film as newly remastered, evidence that it remains active in repertory and home-video circulation rather than surviving only through older prints.
- Trần Nữ Yên Khê, the director’s longtime collaborator, plays Liên, the youngest sister whose playful domestic scenes help establish the film’s relaxed surface rhythm.
- The soundtrack combines Tôn-Thất Tiết’s music with Western recordings, using songs as part of the film’s intimate household atmosphere rather than as simple period markers.
Legacy
The Vertical Ray of the Sun completes an important early arc in Trần Anh Hùng’s career. The Scent of Green Papaya reconstructed remembered Vietnam in Paris; Cyclo confronted contemporary Ho Chi Minh City with jagged violence; this film turns to Hanoi and makes family, weather, and secrecy the center of a more relaxed form. Its international reputation has never been as singularly dominant as Green Papaya’s Oscar and Cannes story or Cyclo’s Golden Lion, yet the film has become essential for understanding Trần’s mature language of sensual observation. It also provides a rare internationally distributed image of urban Vietnamese life around 2000 that is neither driven by war nor by obvious economic crisis. The sisters’ households are modern, culturally layered, and emotionally complicated, making the film valuable as a portrait of intimacy during a period of social transition. Later films by Trần would continue his interest in food, bodily routine, seasonal rhythm, and love expressed through practical acts rather than declarations. It treats beauty not as escape from conflict but as the environment in which conflict quietly persists, a quality that has helped the film age with unusual grace.
Find This Film
Use “Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng” or “The Vertical Ray of the Sun” with Trần Anh Hùng. Sony Pictures maintains the film in its catalogue and Cannes records the 2000 Un Certain Regard selection; prefer remastered or established distributor editions.