THREE SEASONS (BA M`UA) (October) Starring: Don Duong, Nguyen Ngoc Hiep, Tran Manh Cuong, Harvey Keitel, Zoe Bui, Nguyen Huu Duoc. Screenplay: Tony Bui. Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente and Tony Bui. Director: Toni Bui. MPAA Rating: PG (adult themes) Running Time: 113 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Perspective is a curious matter. Take the question of the Vietnam War, for example. The conventional wisdom runs that the United States lost the conflict when troops were withdrawn before the fall of Saigon. For those of you laboring under the misapprehension that that was the end of the story, Tony Bui's THREE SEASONS shows us a modern-day Saigon in the full bloom of capitalism; in the ideological long run, you might say the war was won after all. Sometimes, a thing is entirely how you look at it rather than the thing itself. Even in the mind, style can triumph over substance.
There is an abundance of style on display in THREE SEASONS, enough to cloak its lapses in substance. The narrative consists of four largely independent stories of life in modern Saigon. In one, a young woman named Kien An (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep) goes to work at a lotus farm, and becomes intrigued with the reasons behind the reclusiveness of her employer (Tran Manh Cuong). Another finds cyclo-cab driver Hai (Don Duong) becoming infatuated with local prostitute Lan (Zoe Bui), and intent on serving as her knight in shining armor. The third involves a street urchin and trinket seller named Woody (Nguyen Huu Duoc) on a quest for the suitcase full of goods he lost in a bar. Meanwhile, American Vietnam War veteran James Hager (Harvey Keitel) searches for the daughter he left behind.
Visually, THREE SEASONS is a remarkably assured piece of film-making, using the contrasts of ancient, war-time and modern Vietnam to perfection. In the picturesque countryside, delicate wooden bridges share the landscape with neon advertising signs; in the city, the war's terrible legacy has been turned into an opportunity for a theme bar (characters in the film frequent the "Apocalypse Now Cafe"). Cinematographer Lisa Rinzler captures flower-showered streets and lotus gardens with a warm glow, helping make THREE SEASONS an often enchanting tone poem on the conflicts inherent in introducing the contemporary into the conventional.
As a narrative, it's considerably more inconsistent, as one might expect from the multiple independent story-lines. By far the most effective is the tale of cyclo driver Hai, given the strongest emotional and thematic pull by Don Duong's exceptional performance. At its core his is a tried-and-true hooker with a heart of gold story, yet something in Duong's manner makes the cliche more resonant, his attempts to "save" Lan more ennobling than predictable. Each of the other tales has its moments, but they come more sporadically. Keitel's American perspective feels particularly intrusive, almost like a sop to American audiences; what's more, it adds a title-confounding fourth story to the three seasons. Though THREE SEASONS rarely inspires seat-shifting, it's never as engaging as it is when the focus is on Hai.
Still, the stories do ultimately come together as tales of healing, of reconciling Vietnam's troubled past with its challenging present and future. As the first American production shot in Vietnam since the war, it's also an often-compelling cultural document. There's little doubt that THREE SEASONS feels somehow more "significant" because it is so gracefully and beautifully composed, but that's hardly a cause for consternation. If it pushes plenty of the right aesthetic buttons, that only proves that glamour can change one's perspective, as it clearly has in a post-war Saigon where Coke adds life.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Saigon falls: 7.
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