Yesterday, Cyclo arrived in the mail. I watched it, and I need to watch it again as I was in my exhaustion phase and fell asleep during my nap. So I did not see it all, but I saw enough to know that it is the "dark" side of life as compared to the other two films in the trilogy. They are about home and family and love and relationships. Cyclo, about a poor young man who has to drive a bicycle-taxi about the streets of Ho Chi Min City in order to support his sisters and grandfather, shows the other side: street life, gang life, prostitution, illness, and violence. It is hard to watch and I will watch it again. Just not today.
I love the other two films because they reminded me of so many things about my childhood, and show me again why I feel such a closeness with the older Indian films too. People live simple lives. They make life beautiful where they can do so, with gardens, and their possessions if they are lucky enough to have any. Old people look old, like the Aunty in Pather Panchali, so old you wonder how they can make it, creeping around from day to day trying to find something to eat. The weather is hot. It rains, huge tropical rains with drops the size of fifty cent pieces like the ones I used to watch falling onto the canna lilies when I was little.
In the Vietnamese movies, there are always people coming around. Coming around to sell things, to borrow things, to bring things, to take away things, knock knock knock...in our world we'd hear the sound of a little man who went in a truck to sell vegetables and fruits...toot toot on the corner and you went out to see what he had to sell.
There was the piruli man, who had a big cone of paper and stuck into it were little cones of paper-wrapped candy, sweet and soft. We loved pirulis and I would like to have one this minute.
There were bakers who would come and knock and take you out to their cars where there were trays of breads and rolls..and how good they were.
And at night--the serenaders!! Bands of strolling musicians, usually four violins, would come around. You'd hear them softly playing in the front yard, and you'd all go out front to listen in the dark, while someone in the house grumpily scrounged around for change to give them. If you gave them something, they'd play another tune; if not, they'd move on.
In Mexico City, there was a huge enormous music box, a beautiful and complicated machine, that used to come around in the Colonia where we lived. I'll never forget the main tune it played, and just thinking of it transports me back to those evenings.
And in Vietnam, in the movies I saw there were so many animals in the gardens of the houses...little lizards, and different kinds of frogs and toads. We had them too...we had Mediterranean geckos (though nobody in my family knew the name of them then) which actually sang a beautiful little musical call...they were shy sweet creatures with big eyes and soft bodies with little tubercles all over. I was sung to sleep by them many a night when I was very small.
Nowadays nobody hears those little animals or is very aware if they are around. Perhaps children are...I am told that the geckoes are no more, finally finished off by the deep winter freezes that Global Warming has produced. But I'll bet somebody has them still. Lucky them.
You have to go outside and forget the air-conditioning for a while in order to find out. You have to look for the vacant lots in order to find the tortoises that we used to encounter by the dozens as kids...and the water turtles too, big lumbering creatures. But now they all have less natural habitat to proliferate in. People have chopped down lots of the mesquite brush to use for BBQ wood. The resacas are tamed in the City of Brownsville, I guess totally. It isn't raining as much lately and the winters are colder.
But there are parrots! Lots of little green Mexican parrots took a tip from their 2-legged compatriots and came across the border illegally. There are flocks of them all over Brownsville, Texas, or so I hear.
And there are alligators. Really, there are. I am just going to have to go back to visit, to see if there really are any alligators, or little geckos, or strolling musicians left in this world, outside of old movies. YAZZYBEL
No comments:
Post a Comment