Harvey Keitel (left) in "Three Seasons."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, Jack gives this film a: Stars: Harvey Keitel Director: Tony Bui Rated: PG-13, with profanity and adult situations Length: 110 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle

(June 4, 1999) -- Three Seasons, the first American-financed movie to be shot in today's Vietnam, is a lovely, lyrical fable that romanticizes aspects of life in the city most Americans remember as Saigon.

As the film opens, two strangers have come to the town now called Ho Chi Minh City. Kien An (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep) is a country girl who hopes to work as a lotus picker. James Hager (Harvey Keitel) is a former GI revisiting his past -- and hoping to meet the child he fathered there during the Vietnam War.

Sharing the screen in this cross-section of Vietnamese life are Hai (Don Duong), who peddles a cyclo (a bicycle rickshaw); Woody (Nguyen Huu Duoc), a 10-year-old boy forced into the streets to sell gum and cigarettes from the wooden box that hangs from his neck; and Lan (Zoe Bui), a prostitute who works the big hotels, but wants nothing more out of life than her own air-conditioned room.

The characters occasionally cross paths, but Three Seasons basically settles into three vignettes:

Kien An picks flowers on a large lotus pond whose owner is a mysterious, unseen man. She soon discovers he's a gifted poet, driven into the shadows by disease, and she tries to help him rekindle his talent.

This is the most effective of the three tales, perhaps because it's the most exotic and unusual. The images of the workers singing in the serene pond, surrounded by white flowers, are especially lovely.

Cyclo driver Hai taxies the prostitute Lan from job to job -- and starts to fall for her. She, though, is all business. This story is more conventional -- and I'm not sure we need another romanticized version of prostitution.

Still, it, too, offers stunning images, especially when Hai escorts Lan under the spreading branches of impossibly beautiful red blossoms.

Both Woody the street urchin and Hager the army vet are determined loners, yet inspire each other in surprising ways.

As Hager, Keitel doesn't have much to do; the character spends days on end sitting on a lawn chair on the sidewalk outside his cheap hotel, trying to get up the nerve to contact his now-grown daughter.

(Keitel's biggest contribution was to help first-time writer-director Tony Bui get the film made -- by starring in it and serving as its executive producer.)

Still, the tale of the flower picker and the poet will linger with you -- along with the stunning images of a time and place far removed from the corrupt, war-ravaged Saigon we remember from the evening news of 30 years ago.