Three Seasons
USA/Vietnam 1998
Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Vietnam, the present day. Kien An starts a new job picking white lotuses for Teacher Dao, a reclusive master. While at work, she sings an old song her mother taught her many years ago. After hearing her, Dao invites her to his inner sanctum and asks her to write down his dictated poems since he has lost his fingers through leprosy. Meanwhile, impoverished kid Woody wanders the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in the rain with a suitcase full of cigarettes and lighters to sell to tourists. He comes across ex-GI James Hager, who is searching for the daughter he left behind after the US-Vietnam war. Woody loses his suitcase and mistakenly thinks Hager stole it. His master won't allow him home until he retrieves it.
Hai, a cyclo driver, becomes obsessed with Lan, a young prostitute. He begins to wait for her every night outside the hotels where she services western clients. He earns a big cash prize for winning a cyclo race and with the winnings pays for a night with Lan in a hotel room. To her surprise, he only wants to watch her sleep. Woody finds his suitcase. Kien An's master dies. Hager is reunited with his daughter. Hai tracks Lan down to her grubby apartment. Ashamed of her profession, she tries to make him leave, but is eventually won over by his protestations of love.
Review
Three Seasons portrays Vietnam as a country of glaring contrasts: beautiful lotus-strewn rivers and ancient temples on the one hand; the squalor of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) on the other. Writer-director Tony Bui (now 26) may have grown up in Northern California, but his sympathies here are with the Vietnamese, not the rich westerners visiting the country. Bui repeatedly contrasts the struggles of the locals with the pampered luxury the tourists enjoy. Early on, we see two tourists sitting in the back of a cyclo, sightseeing, blithely unaware of their driver's agony as he pedals uphill.
Rather than analyse the social conditions in Vietnam, Bui (who left the country as a young child) uses them as the backcloth for a very sentimental folk tale. His characters could have stumbled from the pages of Dickens: there's Woody the waif who roams the streets selling cigarettes, Lan the beautiful but unhappy prostitute, Hai the big-hearted cyclo driver and Kien An the demure lotus picker. There's even a gnarled ex-GI (Harvey Keitel at his most lugubrious, also the film's executive producer) who haunts the city in search of the daughter he left behind in the war. ("I just know it's time to find her... to make some sort of peace with this place," he mumbles.)
Bui made Three Seasons in reaction to US war movies in which the Vietnamese are depicted "as faceless people running through the jungle with guns," but he risks replacing one set of stereotypes with another. Outside Woody's Fagin-like boss, there is hardly an unsympathetic Vietnamese character in the film. Outside Keitel's kind-hearted GI, westerners (and western influence) are invariably seen as a force for the bad.
It is intriguing to compare Bui's vision of contemporary Vietnam with that offered by Tran Anh Hung in Cyclo. Like Bui, Hung was born in Vietnam but educated abroad (in his case, in France). Cyclo is also set in Ho Chi Minh City and features rickshaw drivers, vagabonds and prostitutes. Instead of picture-postcard imagery, its city is one where corruption is always festering close to the surface, with vicious turf wars going on between pedicab drivers, gangland killings, and drug abuse. Cyclo has a delirious, expressionistic quality to its film-making which Bui doesn't come close to matching. Where Cyclo is dark and ironic, Three Seasons is optimistic and benevolent in tone. But there's a thin line between optimism and mawkishness. Whereas the street kid in Walter Salles' Central Station was tough and resilient, Woody is a doe-eyed little boy lost. The story of the prostitute and the driver obsessed with her is uncomfortably close to Mona Lisa. As Bui flits between the four main characters, there are lapses in continuity editing. (Whenever Woody is on screen, it is pouring with rain, but as soon as Hai appears, the weather miraculously clears up.)
Three Seasons is exquisitely shot and in its own naive, lyrical way, is also often moving. Bui is an accomplished (if very manipulative) storyteller. Whether through the poetry the leprosy-ravaged master dictates to Kien An as he prepares to die, the imagery of Woody asleep beside the little girl in the rain, or the big emotional set-pieces (for instance, the ex-GI finally meeting his daughter), the young writer-director knows how to crank up the pathos and makes the one big action sequence - the cyclos hurtling through the city - almost as dynamic as the chariot race in Ben Hur. The portrayal of modern-day Vietnam may sometimes seem as ersatz as the fake lotuses sold on the street corners, but taken as simple melodrama, Three Seasons just about stays afloat.
Credits
- Director
- Tony Bui
- Producers
- Jason Kliot
- Joana Vicente
- Tony Bui
- Screenplay
- Tony Bui
- Story
- Tony Bui
- Timothy Linh Bui
- Director of Photography
- Lisa Rinzler
- Editor
- Keith Reamer
- Production Designer
- Wing Lee
- Music
- Richard Horowitz
- ©October Films, Inc.
- Production Companies
- October Films presents an Open City production in association with Goatsingers and Giai Phong Film Studios
- Developed with the assistance of the Sundance Institute
- Executive Producer
- Harvey Keitel
- Co-executive Producer
- Charles Rosen
- Co-producer
- Timothy Linh Bui
- Line Producer
- Trish Hoffman
- Associate Producer
- Ben Bohen
- Production Liaison
- Le Cung Bac
- Production Supervisor
- David Phu An Chiem
- Production Co-ordinators
- New York:
- Susan Leber
- Ho Chi Minh City:
- Elizabeth Ann Chae
- Mark Taylor
- Unit Production Managers
- Peter Schon
- Phan Huy Huyen
- Location Managers
- Martha C. Pilcher
- 2nd Unit:
- Vu Huy Chau Bao
- Production Consultant
- Kieu An
- 2nd Unit Director
- Timothy Linh Bui
- Assistant Directors
- Julian Petrillo
- Pham Ngoc Chau
- Suzanne Nicell
- Sam Coates
- 2nd Unit:
- Quan Lelan
- Script Supervisor
- Monika von Manteuffel
- Casting Director
- Quan Lelan
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography/Camera Operator
- Jamie Maxtone-Graham
- Steadicam Operator
- William S. Arnot
- Special Effects
- Russell Berg
- David Watkins
- Additional Editing
- Jay Rabinowitz
- Additional Film Editor
- Victoria Toth
- Editorial Consultant
- Sam O'Steen
- Art Directors
- Pham Hong Phong
- Michele De Albert
- Set Decorator
- Thai Van Hoang
- Storyboard Artist
- Colin McGreal
- Costume Designer
- Ghia Ci Fam
- Wardrobe
- Supervisor:
- Tran Thi Ngoc Loan
- 2nd Unit:
- Truong Thi Hong
- Key Hair/Make-up
- Nguyen Kieu Thu
- Make-up
- Additional:
- Heang Nga
- Vu Van Viet
- Phuong Trinh
- 2nd Unit:
- Nguyen My Loan
- Special Effects Make-up
- Bob Laden
- Main Title Design
- NY Bureau
- Main Title Opticals
- Cineric Inc
- Opticals
- REI Media Group
- Vietnamese Songs Composer
- Vy Nhat Tao
- Musicians
- Dan Bau/Dan Tranh/The Moon:
- Duc Thanh
- Khen/Dau Tranh/Bass Flute:
- Jaron Lanier
- Vocals:
- Sussan Deyhim
- Keyboards/Percussions:
- Richard Horowitz
- Music Supervisor
- S.A. Lippman
- Music Mixers
- James Nichols
- Richard Horowitz
- Soundtrack
- "Good Ol' Rock-N-Roll" by/performed by Eugene Chrysler; "Don't Forget about Me" by Eugene Chrysler, performed by Eugene Chrysler and his Hillbilly Shake; "Black Night" by Jessie Mae Robinson, performed by Charles Brown; "Woody's Blues" by Page Hamilton, performed by Page Hamilton, Wharton Tiers
- Sound Mixers
- Curtis Choy
- Brian Miksis
- Re-recording Engineers
- Reilly Steele
- Sound One
- Supervising Sound Editors
- Steve Hamilton
- Dave Paterson
- Mary Ellen Porto
- ADR
- Vietnam:
- Bong Sen Film Studio
- Foley
- Artist:
- Beth Henderson
- Dialogue Supervisors
- Tran Anh Hoa
- Pham Van Son
- Film Extract
- High Plains Drifter (1972)
- Cast
- Don Duong
- Hai
- Nguyen Ngoc Hiep
- Kien An
- Tran Manh Cuong
- Teacher Dao
- Zoë Bui
- Lan
- Nguyen Huu Duoc
- Woody
- Thach Thi Kim Trang
- little girl
- Harvey Keitel
- James Hager
- Minh Ngoc
- truck driver
- Hoang Phat Trieu
- Huy
- Diem Kieu
- singing lotus woman
- Kieu Hanh
- Giang
- Le Hong Son
- Binh
- Nguyen Ba Quang
- Don
- Tran Huu Su
- Ngon
- Luong Duc Hung
- Minh
- Hoang Trieu
- Tran Long
- men who chase Lan
- Bui Tuong Trac
- man who buys lotus flowers
- Huynh Kim Hong
- woman on balcony
- Michael Salamon
- man who steals case
- Nguyen Van Son
- shoeshine boy
- A Lu
- Hong Phu Quang
- street guardians
- Tran Quang Hieu
- 'Fagan'
- Duong Tan Dung
- cyclo-race promoter
- Ho Van Hoang
- Khoi
- Ho Kieng
- restaurant owner
- Ngo Quang Hai
- man in taxi
- Van Es Antonie
- body double for Mr Keitel
- Hong Khac Dao
- parlour manager
- Pham Van Thai
- parlour friend
- Othello Khan
- Phuong's drunk boyfriend
- Lola Guimond
- Phuong, Amerasian daughter
- Nguyen Thanh Son
- cyclo-race official
- Nguyen Thi Ngoc
- Teacher Dao's servant
- Nguyen Thi Lien
- grandmother
- Certificate
- 12
- Distributor
- Pathé Distribution
- 9,765 feet
- 108 minutes 30 seconds
- Dolby stereo SR
- Colour by
- DuArt
- Prints by
- FotoKem