Cinema
Three Seasons
Ba Mùa
Tony Bùi · 1999
Synopsis
Ho Chi Minh City in the late nineties. Kiên An is hired to pick the white lotuses of a reclusive master disfigured by leprosy, and her song draws him out of his silence. Hải, a cyclo driver, picks up the same customer every day, a hotel girl, and begins to wait for her. Woody, a boy who sells watches and lighters on café terraces, loses his box and roams the city to find it. A former American soldier is looking for the daughter he left there thirty years earlier.
Context
The screenplay is by two brothers, and the shooting took place in the city itself. The film is acted in Vietnamese by local performers, Harvey Keitel being the only known name on the poster. Lisa Rinzler is behind the camera, Richard Horowitz on the music. Four stories cross in it without ever quite meeting, and the city links them more than the plot does. Its director was twenty-five and was returning to film where he was born, in a city he had left as a small child.
Who it is for
One hour forty-five, in Vietnamese and English, subtitled. Four stories told side by side: one must accept losing sight of each in turn.
Prizes and reception
The first film to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance, in 1999, along with the cinematography prize; the first American film shot in Vietnam since 1975.