"
Longing is the feminine side of love, the cup that wants to be filled." It is a state of being open to possibility and to the future. It is a quest that animates us and carries us into our most strenuous endeavors. Three Seasons, written and directed by Tony Bui, is an extraordinary cross-cultural masterpiece shining with incredible images, a keen sense of place, and a reverence for the incredible yearning of ordinary people.
Hai (Don Duong) is the placid, thoughtful cyclo driver, who falls for one of his customers, the prostitute Lan (Zoe Bui). He waits outside the hotels where she plies her trade, always there to offer her a ride when she is finished for the night. The
detachment necessary to maintain her peace of mind is threatened by his honest affection, which she would return if she were not a prostitute, and she tries to fend him off.
Duong's role, as the hard-working laborer who has to live on the hot streets and hustle to maintain any semblance of dignity, possesses a tender, romantic heart. You find yourself rooting for him when he starts falling in love with one of his customers, the beautiful prostitute Lan. Driving her home at night,
he yearns to give her the love he believes she deserves. Lan is a walking example of Vietnamese grit and determination coupled with the American concepts of capitalism and aggressive sexuality. To the director's credit, she doesn't turn out to be your basic hooker with a heart of gold.
Lan is fascinated by the rich businessmen she charges $50 for sex, and vows, with a kind of wounded arrogance, that she will escape from her world into theirs: "
They have a different talk, a different walk. The sun rises for them, not for us." Yet despite her fantasies about king-size beds and air conditioning, she won't spend the night in her clients' luxurious hotel rooms. Hai, along with the audience, sees right away that beneath Lan's hauteur is a wounded, hungry girl; if the fable of the good-hearted working man and the lonely hooker is a familiar one, it's told here with exquisite sweetness.
She realizes pretty quickly that the rickshaw driver who waits for hours outside the hotel in which she's visiting johns is infatuated with her. One day she says her dream is to spend the whole night in an air-conditioned room. He asks her price ($50), wins that much in a race for cyclo drivers and treats her to her dream. But she only opens the door to his affections after
he pays her not for sex, but simply to watch her sleep. She is grateful, but resists his further advances: She somehow feels she is not entitled to ordinary human emotion. His tenderness unleashes the deep emotions hidden in her hardened heart.
The culmination of this fragile, awkward relationship is a
sweet stroll down an avenue covered with red flowers, the kind of carefully considered visual you find throughout the film. But this one possesses true emotional resonance rather than simply looking gorgeous.
"Three Seasons" is extravagantly beautiful, so full of love, so rich with genuine artistic sympathy, a flight into fantasy of a land of memory and imagination, it has attained a kind of poetic immortality.
Photograph
