Ba mùa

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.

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. ;-)

There are not very many movies that can put the viewer into the trance that this one did. It left me wondering why more American films can't be made like this, with subtlety and an eye for simplistic beauty and peace in nature. The many scenes at night in the rain-soaked city only provide a stark contrast to the scenes with lotus flowers and singing, thus making them more effective and fresh. Above this, the characters were intriguing. None had a life even remotely like mine, and this is probably likewise for 99% of Americans, who live in a fast-track, needlessly complicated, and mostly material world. Materialism exists in Three Seasons, but is seen as the enemy (the plastic lotus flowers) or (in the case of the prostitute) something to overcome. I left the theatre feeling somewhat wistful that there are not more films like this being produced today.

"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.

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. .