Herald raing: ****
Cast: Don Duong, Nguyen Ngoc Hiep, Tran Manh Cuong, Harvey Keitel, Nguyen Huu Duoc
Director: Tony Bui
Running time: 108 mins
Now showing
Review: Peter Calder
Wistful, poignant, evocative and sublime, the first American feature film made in Vietnam is a lovesong to its maker's homeland and a piercing elegy for a culture devoured by the corporate power of a nation that failed to defeat it on the battlefield.
Honoured as best film at Sundance, it's a cinematic tone poem in which the lives of its characters intersect as much thematically as actually.
Bui, 26, who was taken to California as a two-year-old, reacquainted himself with the land of his birth, whose fragile beauty he here depicts as melting in the furnace of globalisation; the elegant colonial facades of Ho Chi Minh City are crowded out by Coca-Cola signs and luxury hotels.
Likewise all the film's characters struggle to survive: a woman who picks white lotus blossoms on a temple lake is losing custom to plastic imitations of the real thing; a poet consumed by leprosy (one of the film's more striking symbolic presences) hides in the shadows; a bicycle rickshaw driver falls in love with a fancy prostitute; a wide-eyed boy sells gimcrack baubles from a suitcase; an ex-GI searches for the daughter he once fathered.
Each is a thread (the film is several interlaced stories) in a tapestry of memory and history.
Hugely skillful and visually rich, Three Seasons is more unabashedly sentimental than writer/director Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo and The Scent of Green Papaya, the only Vietnamese films so far seen here and perhaps less interesting as a result.
It also ends a shade too tidily and some scenes (notably those involving Keitel as the GI) are oddly clumsy. But it's still hypnotically beautiful and highly recommended.
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