In shooting the film Three Seasons, cinematographer Lisa Rinzler joins writer / director Tony Bui on a trip to his changing homeland of Vietnam.
by Vincent LoBrutto
For an entire generation of Americans, the mere mention of Vietnam will forever provoke memories of the pain and loss suffered during a particularly brutal war. Throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, while outrage toward United States military involvement with Vietnam inflamed American discourse, Hollywood was slow to even deal with the subject.
When filmmakers finally did tackle the Vietnam War, most turned their cameras away from the Vietnamese people and their land, history and customs, choosing instead to focus on the U.S. perspective. The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket were all powerful and visionary films made by American filmmakers and financed by Hollywood studios, with action re-created and photographed in Thailand, the Philippines and even far from Vietnam on a London backlot. Directors Michael Cimino, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick transformed the conflict into catastrophic images and narratives which continue to resonate decades after the carnage.
Now, more than two decades after the war's end, director Tony Bui has created a film that shows Vietnam through the eyes of its people. Photographed by rising cinematographer Lisa Rinzler, Three Seasons is the first motion picture fully financed by an American studio to be filmed entirely on location in Vietnam. The film's poetic images and poignant, intertwining stories depict a land and people long hidden from Americans.
Bui, the picture's 25-year-old writer/director, was born in Vietnam just before the fall of Saigon. When he was two years old, his parents left the war-ravaged country and settled in Sunnyvale, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. A teenage zeal for storytelling and the creation of short Super 8mm films and videos led Bui to the film program at Loyola Marymount University. In 1992, he began a series of personal sojourns to Vietnam, and the experience had a lasting impact on his filmmaking aspirations. "Visually, I was so struck and affected by what I saw," Bui recalls. "There were so many changes. It's a country going through a stage of influence. In 1992, there were Russian ships and kiosks everywhere. By 1997, all of that was gone, replaced by Coca-Cola and Pepsi signs and [ubiquitous] taxis — taxis didn't even exist in Vietnam in 1993. From 1992 to 1997 there was a dramatic change and influence, and it was all Western."
Bui's early visits to his homeland inspired him to write a 30-minute short film, Yellow Lotus, which presented the humanity and spirit of the Vietnamese people liberated from the politics of war. The film was shot on location in Vietnam with a student crew of 10 for only $9,000. The country's restrictive government and strict censorship made it difficult for filmmakers to shoot in Vietnam, but Bui submitted his project for permission. "I was so naive, I actually did it," Bui recalls. "If I'd known how hard it would be, I never would have tried. I sent a fax to the film studio there, and they agreed to sponsor me. I couldn't believe it. I said I had no money, and that I would have to use their old Russian dollies and equipment, and they said, `Yes, definitely come.' I think they were interested in the story I was writing because Yellow Lotus had nothing to do with war. I was very conscious about making films that told about Vietnam today." The minister of culture in Hanoi approved the project in less than four days, the fastest go-ahead a foreign filmmaker had ever received. Yellow Lotus premiered at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival, screened at Sundance, won awards at the Hamptons, San Francisco and Chicago film festivals, and was televised on PBS.
The success of Yellow Lotus inspired Bui to take on the challenge of creating a feature film that would open the cinematic door to Vietnam for American and international audiences. Bui approached the subject of present-day Saigon poetically, using the seasons as a metaphor for the rebirth of his ethnic culture. Three Seasons tells the human story of a changing Vietnam through lyrical visual allusions.
The film begins in the Dry Season, tracing the tale of a man who drives a modern-day version of a rickshaw: a three-wheeled bicycle taxi, or cyclo. He falls in love with a high-society call girl, who spends the hot, dry months maneuvering her way out of poverty by sleeping with foreign men. Her character represents an underclass living in the back alleys of a growing city known as "the other world."
The film's second segment, which occurs during the Wet Season, follows an 8-year-old street peddler who loses his wooden case of Zippo lighters on a rainy night. During his search for the lighters, the boy meets a six-year-old orphan girl with whom he forms a silent bond. As these Buoi Doi (or "children of the night") make their way through the night world of Saigon, the city's drug dealers, prostitutes, trashy bars and clubs are revealed through their eyes. The boy eventually follows an ex-G.I. (Harvey Keitel, the only American actor in the cast) who he thinks may have stolen the case. The G.I. is on his own personal odyssey to find the half-Vietnamese daughter he has never met.
In the final segment, which unfolds in the Growth Season, the simple existence of a lotus picker is threatened by a company producing plastic lotuses that will never die. The woman's relationship with the reclusive lotus plantation master, an eccentric bard, is contrasted with the growing commercialization of the country.
The journey of Three Seasons, from poetic words on paper to location work in Vietnam, began when Yellow Lotus was screened at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival. Bui was subsequently invited to participate in the Sundance Institute's prestigious month-long lab program, where he developed four scenes from the Three Seasons screenplay. "That experience changed my entire life," Bui recalls. "I came in contact with some of the most amazing filmmakers, writers and cinematographers. Michael Ballhaus [ASC] became a huge supporter and actually tried to help me get financing for the film. He was so helpful and humble. Allen Daviau [ASC] was also very generous. He actually read the script and gave me pointers about shooting in rain. We've become good friends, and I visit him on the set of whatever he's shooting. Those two guys were able to help me to interpret my project visually."
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© 1999 ASC