THREE SEASONS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. October Films Director: Tony Bui Writer: Tony Bui Cast: Nguyen Gnoc Hiep, Tran Manh Cuong, Don Duong, Zoe Bui, Harvey Keitel, Nguyen Huu Duoc
When I taught high-school history we had to follow the syllabus exactly. One lesson dealing with the close of World War II had the title, "Japan's Loss is a Blessing in Disguise for the Japanese People." Pretty presumptuous of New York State to make that judgment, isn't it? The department of education is virtually saying, "Who won the war anyway?" and when you look at the Japan of 1990 and compare it to the feudal country that existed until the mid-19th century and liken the currently prosperous state with the immediate post- war economy of shoddy goods and cheap labor, you might even agree.
Could we say the same thing when we look at the Vietnam of the past decade? Though the United States dropped more firepower on that little nation than it did in all the conventional bombings of World War 2, you wonder why. The U.S. would have won the war without ever dropping by. Looking at Saigon--which was seized by the North and renamed Ho Chi Minh City (though nobody calls it that)--it appears so capitalistic that you'd think the U.S. prevailed and made the place in its own image. Some of the early images that strike the viewer of Tony Bui's meditative, profoundly lyrical "Three Seasons"--the neon street advertisements for Maxwell tapes and products, for Ricoh cameras; the glitzy hotels patronized by rich Vietnamese, Europeans and Americans--we can but come away with the impression that the Communist leaders of Vietnam avoided the mistakes made by Fidel Castro in Cuba. Of course Saigon was not a Communist-run city until after the war. But rather than proletarianize the infrastructure by converting hotels into deteriorating housing for visiting dignitaries and cracking down on prostitution, the honchos of the now-united Vietnam look the other way at street hustling. They may see the profession perhaps as a way to attract dollars, and condone geisha-style girls in the plush lodgings to lure the greenbacks to the Indochinese state. How does this film allow us to make these assumptions? The production notes state that the censors followed the filmmakers around and scrutinized every foot of celluloid, refusing to allow a discarded meat bun to pass muster while feeling perfectly at ease with the peregrinations of a smart- looking, well-dressed hooker.
If "Three Seasons" were simply a testament to the power of capitalism to hold sway where violence failed, it would hold only minor interest with any but a specialized audience. Agitprop is hardly the stuff of entertainment. At its core the picture deals poetically with troubled people, individuals seeking some sort of closure in their lives, some resolution to their difficulties. As James Hager, a GI who had fought the Viet Cong some thirty years earlier and is now back in Saigon on a different mission, Harvey Keitel is not the most compelling character. But he is the one most likely to engage a western public. Hager has been spending time in Saigon eager to meet the daughter he left behind after his brief affair with a Vietnamese woman. He spends his days lounging outside the hotel, his nights drunk in a bar known as "Apocalypse Now." Though he appears to the cyclo drivers who observe him day after day to be a kind of zombie, he emerges as a compassionate man eager to resolve what he calls his problem with Vietnam. Kien An (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep), yet another person seeking some form of completion, is a young woman who has taken the job of picking lotus flowers as women had done for generations, selling them in the city. A poet at heart, she meets the reclusive supervisor of the lotus pond, Teacher Dao (Tran Manh Cuong), who was once handsome but is now being consumed by leprosy. When Dao--who invites young Kien to his darkened room in a temple--informs her that he used to write poetry but then lost his fingers to the dread disease, she offers her own fingers and becomes entranced with the Teacher's recitations of verse. The most riveting relationship, however, is between Lan (Zoe Bui), a prostitute who works the plush hotels like the Majestic, and her admirer, Hai (Don Duong), who hangs about her hotels like a puppy to offer her rides. Hai's ambition is to earn the $50 that Lan requires of men who want to spend the night with her. Because of his love for the woman, however, he has no intention of exploiting her and will prove instrumental in resolving Lan's own incompleteness as well as his own.
The acting of the ensemble is first-rate throughout, not unexpected considering that Don Duong is Vietnam's best- known actor and that 108 kids auditioned for the part of yet another principal, Woody (Nguyen Huu Duoc), a street urchin who sells trinkets to tourists and winds up involved in quite an adventure himself. Ironically, the film proves more critical of capitalism than you might expect the Communist government to be. In a rare meditative mood, Lan tells her admiring cyclo driver of the rich folks she observes, "We live in their shadows every time they build a new hotel...they're not like us...I'll do anything, even marry one, to live as they do."
Director Tony Bui, a 26-year-old Vietnamese American who fell in love with the Far Eastern country he had not seen until he was 19 years of age, scatters his film with metaphors. They do not get in the way, however, but add immeasurably to the film's deliberate charm. Kien An complains that people are buying more plastic flowers than her natural lotuses: "convenience is everything for them...the flowers will not wilt or die." Even those who do not care for the slow pace of the story or the absence of American-style melodrama will appreciate cinematographer Lisa Rinzler's photography. Rinzler contrasts the dilapidated side streets with the bright lights of the Saigon's "Ginza"; the rustic simplicity of the lotus pond with the drunken entertainment of the tourists and wealthier citizens. Working with a crew that included both Vietnamese and Americans, director Tony Bui has turned out a spiritual meditation on a peaceful people whose nationalist spirit successfully repelled Chinese, French and American invaders but has become itself overrun with the fast pace and modern spirit of capitalism.
Not Yet Rated. Running Time: 110 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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