Saigon Stories

"Three Seasons" has many layers of complexity, yet it's executed in a deceptively simple and poetic fashion which seems to just flow off the screen. Some may find it too long or may perhaps feel the film seems to get lost in all its elegance. However, hang in there, the payoff comes through understanding it in its entirety.

"Three Seasons" is a touching and poignant display of Vietnamese society and the dramatic changes it's going through. The cinematography and direction were beautiful and reminded me a bit of the film "Scent of Green Papaya".

The movie is a collection of at least four different stories, all taking place in Saigon in the present day. Basically, each story is about the struggle to survive, both physically and spiritually in an ever changing and modernized society. Class struggle, the influence from the West (both bad and good), exploitation of children, and corruption of the soul are examined. We are told that like the lotus, some will fall in the mud, and others will fall in a rich pond. "Three Seasons" follows the lives of these flowers and the purity and divinity within them.

i was not really into art films had not my anthro class required me to watch the film Three Seasons. Initial impression: Subtle, Asian version of Magnolia. Although Magnolia gave a hard stroke on American life and beauty by presenting brutish and twisted lives of different people, Three Seasons was softer and was more focused on redemption and search for contentment and happiness in life through a plain yet colorful lives of different Vietnamese and an American. The pictures were astonishing and moving--you feel what you see and it was such an enigma to evoke such essence of a story without flooding the whole of the movie with rhetorical lines and words. the enigma i felt was the same when i watched Magnolia but i think i love this movie more than it. Three Seasons did not have enough words but the pictures were really great. i personally love the song of Kien An and the petal shower before the story ends--they were so impressing. The biggest lesson i got in the story is that dreams somehow and someday will come true, our search for happiness and contentment will end in a different way we intended. i have to thank my anthro professor, i have to thank Three Seasons. ;-)

Director Tony Bui left Vietnam to live in California when he was only two years old, then returned to take a look at postwar Vietnam in 1994. The result was his 1999 film Three Seasons that walked away with a prize for Lisa Rinzler's cinematography as well as the Best Dramatic Picture Award at the Sundance Film Festival. Performed in Vietnamese with Vietnamese actors, Three Seasons is a series of interweaving stories about loss and redemption in the lives of four characters living in Ho Chi Minh City (though the residents apparently still call it Saigon). Its strength lies, not in its plot or characters, but in the stunning images and dreamlike quality that transports the viewer into a world of sensuous music and soft colors where village women sing while they work, harvesting flowers on a lotus lake.

The main and most effective story is about a cyclo driver Hai (Don Duong) who falls in love with a prostitute named Lan (Zoe Bui), He wants to "redeem" her innocence and dutifully waits for her each day as she leaves her hotel. When they go to a hotel together, he pays $50 from the money he won in a cyclo race merely to watch her sleep, a gesture that allows her to experience the feeling of being loved for the first time. The second story is about a young lotus picker Kien An, a female orphan (Ngoc Hiep Nguyen) who befriends her employer, Teacher Dao (Manh Cuong Tran), and lovingly copies his poems that he cannot record himself because of leprosy. This gesture allows both to touch the poetic quality of life, the teacher for perhaps the last time. The other stories involve a five-year old street urchin named Woody (Huu Duoc Nguen) who braves monsoon-like weather to sell trinkets to tourists in order to survive. When the box containing his wares is stolen, he sets out to find it. This brings him in contact with an American, James Hager (Harvey Keitel) in Vietnam to search for the daughter he left behind when the war was over. This last episode is the least developed of the four and Keitel's performance seems listless in spite of the fact that he is Executive Producer of the film. All four stories come together at the end in a way that ties up all loose ends.

Though I am grateful for any look into Vietnam, Three Seasons left me wanting more. It is almost as if Bui was being overly cautious, afraid to say anything about what he saw because of the censors following him around. As a result, his film does not convey a strong sense of time and place, and the neon street signs and glamorous hotels patronized by the rich could be anywhere in the world. Perhaps it is true that the city's culture is being overrun by rampant commercialism, but the director observes this without comment and seems content to offer only a highly romanticized tone poem. Even the city's textures, squalid areas, and chaotic energy are so muted by the use of camera filters that it robs them of their steamy authenticity. Three Seasons is visually striking but left me feeling like a distant observer. I found the characters to be neither fresh nor engaging and the film overly composed, lacking in the poetic vision that turns an average film experience into a great one.

Please do yourself a favor and see this film. It is a beautiful and touching masterpiece. The film is set in a large city in modern day Vietnam. I believe it was Saigon. The film centers around the lives of several individuals. There is the ex-Marine (Harvey Keitel), hanging around an old GI bar (now a restaurant), hoping to find his daughter; The cyle taxi driver, who yearns to romance a local call girl; the flower girl who volunteers to write for a reclusive poet who lost his hands to leperacy; and the little boy who sells watches and cigarette lighters in hotels, bars, and the street. All these characters are weaved beautifully into the story like a boat moving slowly but surely up a river to a wonderful place. I have seen very very few movies in the past several years which qualify as true works of art. This movie is the real deal. .

Kien An takes a job harvesting white lotuses in the fields belonging to a reclusive man and then selling them in the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. After her song catches the ear of Teacher Dao, he invites her to his home where she engages him and starts to write the poetry he has within him. At the same time a cyclo driver collects Lan as a standard fare and, despite her being a working girl, decides to wait for her, quickly becoming practically her own private cyclo driver; however his interest in her quickly becomes love and he tries to break though her tough exterior to find her heart. Meanwhile on the streets of the city, Woody is a street kid selling cigarettes out of briefcase in all weather. It is here where he meets James Hager, an American looking for a daughter he believes he fathered during the war. After meeting James, Woody loses his case and believing James robbed him, sets out to find him. These three stories barely touch but are delivered as all part of the same one in this film.

The only thing I knew about this film prior to watching it was that it was the first American film to be made in Vietnam once the embargo was lifted and that inspectors for the Vietnamese government observed the entire process. With this acting as a hook for me, I decided to give this film a stab and in a way I am glad that I did. The film does the well-known technique of mixing together several stories with a vague connection (in this case seemingly flowers or some general meetings between the characters) and this succeeds in making it interesting while at the same time preventing it from really becoming as engaging as it should have been. The stories all have enough going for them to get an audience interesting in the various characters but sadly none of the three stories are original or emotionally involving enough on their own or in combination to make this a particularly impressive film. The three tales all pretty much go where you expect them to, even if some of them are pretty unlikely and unconvincing; it's a shame of course as this could have had a place in history and been really good but instead it is just OK.

The thing that will stick in my mind is how good the film looked and most of this is down to the cinematography and the direction of Tony Bui. For all his weaknesses in his plot and script, Bui makes the city look appealing without simplifying or sweetening it – the use of colour is nice but for me it was more enjoyable to see the energy, bustle and depravity of the city itself. For the western audience, Harvey Keitel is naturally going to be the biggest draw but he actually does very little other than be his own reliable self in a minor character. Duong is slightly more impressive and he plays a hackneyed character well enough to make it better than it should have been. However he, like the others, are hampered by the material to some extent. Ngoc Hiep Nguyen is sweet and pretty good; Huu Duoc Nguyen is probably the best thing in the film as he is convincing and never slips into 'cute kid' mode. Bui is alright as Lan but her character is far too simple to really allow her to have the tools to work with.

Overall this is an interesting film that is good enough to be worth seeing however it is hard to really ignore how basic the plots all turn out to be and it isn't as emotionally impacting as it could have been. The direction is good and the performances are as good as the material allows them to be but without a better script the film cannot really be more than OK.