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 THREE
SEASONS IS NOMINATED FOR BEST FILM EXPOSÉ OF 1999
With the war in Yugoslavia rapidly turning a modern country
into a Third World nation, release of Three Seasons,
a film about contemporary Vietnam, seems unusually well timed.
Despite the fact that the United States was allied with Ho
Chi Minh during World War II, Vietnam was engaged in civil
war from 1945 to 1975, and for the last decade of that war
was bombed and invaded by Americans who believed that they
were helping a people to stop Communism. Then for another
15 years, Vietnam was subject to an embargo and not allowed
by the West and its allies to recover from the damage or the
wounds of the war. Although American documentaries have been
coming out of Vietnam for the last fifteen years, and the
French have given us Indochine (1992) and The
Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Americans have been
obsessed with films featuring Rambos and anti-Rambos. Now,
youthful director-author-coproducer Vietnamese-American Tony
Bui gives us a very different update of Vietnam in this film
through the lives of several of its unfortunate victims. Of
his three seasons—birth, life, and death—he focuses most on
the time between birth and death when life must have meaning
to be worth living. Shot in the environs of Ho Chi Minh City,
we see the beauty of nature and the ugliness of human settlements,
with a haunting trace of the American presence for the nostalgic.
In the beginning of the film, we observe Kien An, a female
orphan (played by Ngoc Hiep Nguyen), whose application to
be a lotus picker and street seller has just been accepted;
in due course, she finds redemption in translating poems of
Teacher Dao, her employer (played by Manh Cuong Tran), who
is disabled by leprosy, while her fellow lotus-pickers are
content to enjoy singing as they work. Among the pedicab drivers,
who await customers outside opulent hotels, Hai (played by
Don Duong) finds redemption by courting Lan, a prostitute
(played by Zoe Bui); lacking families, they are ultimately
drawn together by his tenderness. Woody, a five-year-old urchin
(played by Huu Duoc Nguen), tries to sell junk trinkets to
survive, and has to endure rudeness from hotel management
while pursuing his craft, but he finds joy in a game of soccer
with boys his age in the rain.
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A haunted
American war veteran, James Hager (played by Harvey Keitel,
who is also the executive producer of the film), returns to
claim his daughter, an Amerasian whose rejection by Vietnamese
society means that she can only obtain income as a prostitute
for foreigners. Some of the lives of the characters crisscross,
but that is not the point of the film, which challenges us
to discover a universal message—that people make mistakes
and suffer as a result, but life can still have meaning if
we can just be kind and help one another. With cinematography
that reminds us of last year’s The Thin Red Line,
the film Three Seasons was the rage of this
year’s Sundance Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize, the
award for Best Cinematography, and the Audience Award. Censors
in Vietnam cleared the film in its present form, which appears
to tell Americans, in Hager’s words, to find "some peace with
this place" by returning. However, the film is designed to
be unsettling to Americans, who are collectively responsible
for the tragically fragmented society that we view and could,
if motivated by unselfish impulses, claim the children that
they fathered, adopt adorable orphans and urchins seeking
a better life, and provide humanitarian assistance to a highly
cultured and literate country that heroically refused to be
"bombed into the Stone Age." Many will walk out of the theatre
baffled, unmoved, and unimpressed—except at Sundance, where
Three Seasons received a standing ovation at
its first screening. As a film exposing the reality of contemporary
Vietnam, released on the date that marked the 24th anniversary
of the end of Vietnam’s civil war, Three Seasons
is the year’s first film nominated for a Political Film Society
award as an exposé that truly brings new facts to light relevant
to a public policy problem that calls for more action by the
United States. MH
NEW
SYLLABUS AVAILABLE
Thanks to Karen F. Lloyd and Jay M. Parker of the U.S. Military
Academy, the Political Film Society now offers a new course
syllabus. Click here to see
the Society's other publications.
NOMINEES
FOR 1999
EXPOSÉ:
Three Seasons
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