On the anniversary of their mother’s death, three sisters reminisce about the idyllic relationship that their late mother had with their father, who—in their eyes–poetically passed a month after their mother died. They were inseparable to the end, a perfect sort of relationship. During the conversation, a mysterious Toàn was also brought up—a crush, a fantasy, or maybe a lover of the mother, and a foil to their imagined ideal romance. They decide to drop that line of thought.
The Vertical Ray of the Sun opens with Liên (Tran Nu Yen-Khe), the youngest sister, and Hải (Ngo Quang Hai), her shared roommate, going through one of their morning routines, and its one of beauty. Streaks of sunlight pour into their luscious, plant-covered room, as the pair stretch and smoke to start the day, lounging around as the sun radiates off their sweaty skin, wet from humidity. The duo almost looks like they’re performing the parts of something out of In the Mood for Love, who share a cinematographer, Mark Ping-Lee, with this film. The one hitch is that these prototypical movie star lovers are twins. Perhaps we were led astray by the film’s framing, a sultry presentation belies the true nature of the relationship. It’s a mistake that many in the film itself makes as well, the two even tease each other about how outsiders see them. Liên remarking, “We look good together, right?”
Then there’s the middle sister, Khanh (Le Khanh), who is soon expecting a child with her husband, Kiên (Tran Manh Cuong), a novelist. And the oldest sister, Sương (Nguyễn Như Quỳnh), who has a little kid with the often traveling Quốc (Chu Hung). The three sisters mark three chapters in a woman’s life, a lá Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman, but with a specific lens on their romantic relationships.
Just as Liên’s performance gives way to something a bit different, Sương and Quốc’s relationship also has another dimension to it. While they appear the most steady, both are engaged in affairs of sorts. There’s a picturesque scene in which Quốc is floating on a boat, understanding that his balancing act of being married to Sương while also having another family on the side is untenable, logistically and emotionally.
Sương too is seeing someone in a sense as well. She meets with a man and in these arranged meetings, touch and caress each other, but she sets specific constraints, instructing that she will not speak. But are these barriers and boundaries enough? Who do they protect in the end? Her actions speak to the many needs and wants that make up a relationship, and how often a singular partner can’t fulfill every aspect of that. These secret meetings could be a call to fulfill a physical intimacy she doesn’t get with Kiên, even if Kiên satisfies her in many other ways. Likewise, Liên and Hải find something that Roger Ebert describes as, “emotional, not physical incest.” Regardless of how one feels about the morality of these relationships, they speak to a deep exploration of the multiplicities in which love, lust, want, and desire manifest.
Khanh encounters a surprise of her own, when she finds a napkin with a room number and time scribbled in lipstick in the pocket of her husband’s jacket. In the scene before, we see that Kiên does indeed take this woman’s advances and visits her hotel room, before promptly leaving. Is that infidelity? Does it have to be physical to count as cheating? Does it matter that he left before doing anything, does it matter that he entertained these thoughts?
Does cheating start at the action or the intent? Could a thought be an action all the same? These boundaries are continuously investigated here. Hải and Liên constantly play-act as couples, even in their most intimate times, from dancing together to sleeping in the same bed. What’s close, and what is too close? Sương is devastated to find that Kiên has a whole other family, but in an emotionally resonant scene, she declares that what matters is that he still loves her. Is there room for more?
These questions are often mired in layers of context and perspective, the way that we, as viewers, see some moments of intimacy with certain information, and other moments without context, giving the tiniest of glimpses into the multitudes of connections and threads being made.
Perhaps it’s better to look less at answering where these lines might be drawn, and more at the tug and pull that create these cloudy regions of intimacy to begin with. Even between the three sisters, who clearly have kinship and love for each other, not everything is revealed to each other, secrets still exist, performances are still generated. Just as the actors perform as characters in a film, they perform as characters in life too, consciously and subconsciously. They perform as the person they want to be, the person they feel pressured to be, the person they feel obligated to be. The pressure is internal and external, and it becomes increasingly difficult to parse through individual motivation or intention. This isn’t to absolve the individual of responsibility from action, but to complicate the threads that ultimately create feelings of love and desire.
Some thought must also be put into how some of these options get increasingly closed off through the ways in which patriarchy constructs family, relationships, and intimacy. It’s no surprise that Liên, who is unmarried and dating around, feels the greatest freedom to explore. In the framework of patriarchy, in which relationships are dictated by domination and obligation, and romance is locked into strict, binary definitions, it’s little surprise that many people feel unfulfilled or lost. Love is an abundant feeling, and can and should be expressed in a multitude of ways with many people. This doesn’t justify infidelity, but rather condemns the narrow ways in which many societies construct romance.
When Toàn is brought up, the sisters seem to contemplate on whether that tarnishes their imagination of their parent’s love for each other. What does it mean that their mother can love their father with all of her heart, but may still have feelings for someone else? It feels like the question that haunts many of the relationships here. There are questions about whether a double life makes any one of them less true, or whether thinking about something is the same as acting on it. The most daunting answer is that there might a place in which all of this can and is true. There’s no better testament to the power and complexities of human relationships than through the ways in which love (and the desire for love) can create these multitudes that confuse and irritate, but ultimately—and hopefully—also fulfill and nourish.