With
the war in Yugoslavia rapidly turning a modern country into
a Third World nation, release of Three Seasons,
a film about contemporary Vietnam, seems unusually well timed.
Despite the fact that the United States was allied with Ho
Chi Minh during World War II, Vietnam was engaged in civil
war from 1945 to 1975, and for the last decade of that war
was bombed and invaded by Americans who believed that they
were helping a people to stop Communism. Then for another
15 years, Vietnam was subject to an embargo and not allowed
by the West and its allies to recover from the damage or the
wounds of the war. Although American documentaries have been
coming out of Vietnam for the last fifteen years, and the
French have given us The Lover (1991) and Indochine
(1993), Americans have been obsessed with films featuring
Rambos and anti-Rambos. Now, youthful director-author-coproducer
Vietnamese-American Tony Bui gives us a very different update
of Vietnam in this film through the lives of several of its
unfortunate victims. Of his three seasons—birth, life, and
death—he focuses most on the time between birth and death
when life must have meaning to be worth living. Shot in the
environs of Ho Chi Minh City, we see the beauty of nature
and the ugliness of human settlements, with a haunting trace
of the American presence for the nostalgic. In the beginning
of the film, we observe Kien An, a female orphan (played by
Ngoc Hiep Nguyen), whose application to be a lotus picker
and street seller has just been accepted; in due course, she
finds redemption in translating poems of Teacher Dao, her
employer (played by Manh Cuong Tran), who is disabled by leprosy,
while her fellow lotus-pickers are content to enjoy singing
as they work. Among the pedicab drivers, who await customers
outside opulent hotels, Hai (played by Don Duong) finds redemption
by courting Lan, a prostitute (played by Zoe Bui); lacking
families, they are ultimately drawn together by his tenderness.
Woody, a five-year-old urchin (played by Huu Duoc Nguen),
tries to sell junk trinkets to survive, and has to endure
rudeness from hotel management while pursuing his craft, but
he finds joy in a game of soccer with boys his age in the
rain. A haunted American war veteran, James Hager (played
by Harvey Keitel, who is also the executive producer of the
film), returns to claim his daughter, an Amerasian whose rejection
by Vietnamese society means that she can only obtain income
as a prostitute for foreigners. Some of the lives of the characters
crisscross, but that is not the point of the film, which challenges
us to discover a universal message—that people make mistakes
and suffer as a result, but life can still have meaning if
we can just be kind and help one another. With cinematography
that reminds us of last year’s The Thin Red Line,
the film Three Seasons was the rage of this
year’s Sundance Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize, the
award for Best Cinematography, and the Audience Award. Censors
in Vietnam cleared the film in its present form, which appears
to tell Americans, in Hager’s words, to find "some peace with
this place" by returning. However, the film is designed to
be unsettling to Americans, who are collectively responsible
for the tragically fragmented society that we view and could,
if motivated by unselfish impulses, claim the children that
they fathered, adopt adorable orphans and urchins seeking
a better life, and provide humanitarian assistance to a highly
cultured and literate country that heroically refused to be
"bombed into the Stone Age." Many will walk out of the theatre
baffled, unmoved, and unimpressed—except at Sundance, where
Three Seasons received a standing ovation at
its first screening. MH
I
want to comment on this film
