The next installment of this fall's film series at the Maridon Museum is the 2000 Vietnamese film The Vertical Ray of the Sun (Mùa hè chiều thẳng đứng) on October 25. A 2001 New York Times review writes of it:
The Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung's first two features, ''The Scent of Green Papaya'' and ''Cyclo,'' were partly inspired by the lives of his parents. The first, shot entirely on a soundstage in France, conjured an elusive dream of Saigon in the twilight of French colonial rule. The second, filmed in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, was a brutal, surreal nightmare of third-world urban life.The movie starts at 6:00 pm and is free and open to the public, though reservations are required to be made by phone: 724-282-0123. The Maridon Museum is an Asian art museum at 322 N. McKean St. in downtown Butler (map) that runs film series periodically throughout the year, in addition to art classes, book club meetings, and its regular exhibits.
In his new film, ''The Vertical Ray of the Sun,'' Mr. Hung moves north to Hanoi -- a city whose pace of life seems languourous and stately -- and examines, with Chekhovian decorum, the lives of three sisters whose parents have recently died. The film is an oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.
Mr. Hung, working with the cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bin, who shot Wong Kar-wai's gorgeous ''In the Mood for Love,'' composes scenes of such delicate beauty that you almost want to climb into the frame. The dark greens and pale yellows of the city's foliage and its sunlight have an almost tactile density, and when the scene periodically shifts to the countryside, the sudden widening of perspective and the altered quality of light produce a kind of awe.