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T hree Seasons marks a key point in American cinema. Winner of the Best Drama award at the 1999 Sundance festival, Three Seasons is the first American movie to be set in Vietnam after the war, and the first American movie ever to be acted in Vietnamese, by Vietnamese actors. On top of this, the movie is directed by a Vietnamese American, Tony Bui.
Bui, only 26, carries these historical and cultural burdens with remarkable grace in a movie that is at once true to the particularity of postwar Saigon life and universal in human qualities. Rather than focusing on a single protagonist, the film follows the interlocking stories of several characters. A young woman, Kien An (Ngoc Hiep), is hired to pick white lotuses in the rivers outside of Saigon and then sell them in the big city. Her hard life is complicated when the reclusive master of the field, Teacher Dao (Manh Cuong), is attracted by her singing. In the center of the city, Hai (Don Duong), a cyclo driver, falls for a prostitute, Lan (Zoe Bui), whom he often sees departing from the new hotels in the city. Another central character is Woody, a young boy who wanders the streets selling gum, lighters, and other trinkets. The only American in the movie is James Hager (Harvey Keitel), who is searching for the daughter he left behind in the war. He is the only character for whom the war is a present concern. The others are preoccupied with surviving in today's Vietnam.
Bui tells the story of each character well. Kien An's master turns out to be a leper who has lost his face and fingers to the disease. Her compassion toward him in his final months is portrayed with realism and soul. Woody is another in a long line of movie street urchins, but his story is told without manipulation. It is his liveliness, not the destitution in which he finds himself, that creates empathy for him. Harvey Keitel's work is remarkably understated. It is refreshing to see a star performing for a first-time director in a film likely to draw little box-office attention. And when his character is called upon to embody the feelings of a GI upon his first meeting with the child he left behind, Keitel delivers.
But at the heart of the film is the improbable love story of Hai and Lan. Here Bui displays a genuinely multicultural vision (as opposed to the nebulous sort we see in most films) that, if built upon, will make him a director of considerable note in the years to come. Under Bui's guidance, this romance becomes richly symbolic of Vietnam and its postwar struggles.
Hai, the cyclo driver, is an emblem of the common working man. His is a difficult job, requiring the driver to ride a bicycle with a large seat at the front to carry the passenger through the packed city streets under the hot Asian sun. It is a job not desired but certainly respected. Prostitution, on the other hand, is a profession viewed with considerable disdain, and the proliferation of prostitution during the war has only heightened the shame associated with it in Vietnam, where it suggests a subservience to decadent but powerful foreigners. Indeed, the fact that a Vietnamese woman was being portrayed as a prostitute in yet another American film raised the ire of many of my Vietnamese friends before they had even seen the film.
Bui knew that he risked alienating his Vietnamese American audience, but he tells the story of the unlikely lovers in a way that symbolizes the resilience of Vietnamese culture. In the movie's key scene, Hai welcomes Lan to his tiny apartment, a sharp contrast to her encounters in the marble hotels. This is the moment the movie has been building toward. She takes off her blouse and lies down on her stomach on the small bed. Hai begins to rub her back with what looks to be water. Everyone viewing the scene expects a Hollywood ending in which Hai and Lan's mutual "love" is consummated by passionate sex.
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