Local hero
A return home garners many surprises--and an
award-winning film for Vietnamese-American
director Tony Bui
LOS ANGELES - Earlier this year, a film by a 26-year-old
Vietnamese-American, Tony Bui, took the independent
film world by storm. His feature, Three Seasons, won
the top award, the Grand Jury Prize, at the Sundance
Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It was a surprising
choice. Sundance is known for its tough, edgy tastes,
but Bui's film is a lyrical, if bittersweet, look at modern
Vietnamese life, told through four stories that have the
romanticized quality of fables. Also surprising was the
fact that the film received the audience award as
well--thus, it won over both critics and audiences.
Certainly, Three Seasons gives us a completely fresh
take on a country so tragically riven by war: It portrays
a society in which individuals search not only for
economic survival, but also for love, connections, and
grace. For them the war is a faint, diminishing echo,
heard far more loudly by Americans than Vietnamese.
"The entire country is about moving forward and
progressing," Bui says, "and I think they're more at
peace with the past conflict than we are, we Americans.
We still have a lot of guilt about it, a lot of frustrations."
Born in Vietnam, Bui went to the United States with his
family when he was two. Growing up in Sunnyvale,
California, he was encouraged by his mother to go
back to his native land. His first visit was not a success:
He was 19 and couldn't stand it--the heat, the
congestion, the pollution. But then he went back again,
and again, and began to discover his roots. As a
student studying film at Loyola Marymount University,
Bui's sojourns in Vietnam were eked out on a
shoestring budget. He stayed in private homes and
spent a lot of time "hanging around on the streets,"
talking with cyclo (trishaw) drivers and watching poor
people trying to make ends meet. He also began to
form the ideas that would eventually become his films.
In 1995 he completed a short film called Yellow Lotus,
starring his uncle Don Duong, a well-known actor in
Vietnam who also features in his current film. Bui calls
Yellow Lotus "an earlier incarnation of Three
Seasons--a peasant comes to the city, a man trying to
find his place amid this change." The earlier film was
shown at the Telluride and Sundance Film Festivals and
won several awards. In 1996 he was accepted into
Sundance's Writer's and Director's Labs, and the result
was the script for Three Seasons. Its $2 million
production cost was funded by Good Machine, a New
York production company that has backed some of
Taiwanese director Ang Lee's films.
The film's title comes from the idea that south Vietnam,
where the film was shot, has two seasons, the dry and
the wet. For Bui, the third season is the one of growth--
"the season of hope, the season of life and poetry and
music." Each story within the film is set in a different
season: The story of the cyclo driver is set in the hot,
dry season and is full of the warmth of yellows and
oranges; the little boy vendor is set in the wet season of
blues and greys; and the growth season is the backdrop
for the story of Teacher Dao and the young woman
who becomes his temporary confidante. The story of
James Hager, the ex-GI, takes place across the
time-frame of the others.
From the start Bui insisted that the film be made in
Vietnamese and in Vietnam--a tough battle due to the
traditional prejudice American audiences have against
foreign-language films, as well as the logistical
complications of shooting in Vietnam. But Bui, backed
by his producers, got his way. Three Seasons was thus
the first American film to be made in Vietnam since the
fall of Saigon in 1975. When he took his American
crew there for filming, some were fearful of possible
resentment and reprisals. After all, didn't the
Vietnamese hate the Americans for the years of fighting,
for bombing their country?
But that was one problem that didn't materialize, Bui
says. "They're so past that--they had 1,000 years of
war. Before the Americans they fought so many people,
after the Americans they fought people--the Chinese,
the Cambodians." With his fresh, open face and small
ponytail, Bui is the very picture of Californian health. He
talks quickly, his words slurring over each other as if his
thoughts cannot get out fast enough. "The American
conflict was one war in their lives, and they've moved
on."
He did run into numerous other difficulties, though. The
Ministry of Culture had to approve the script, and Bui
had innumerable meetings over it--as well as being
obliged to show the rough cuts of each day's shooting
to officials. "They're very respectful and kind, but
they're tough, to the point they read way too much into
everything," Bui recalls. "I understood where they were
coming from--ultimately they want a film to portray the
country in a decent way." In 1995 the authorities had
been infuriated by the release of French-Vietnamese
director Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo, which turned out to
be extremely violent, and they wanted to avoid a
repeat.
Not surprisingly, Bui's desire to detail the extreme
poverty and the prostitution in Ho Chi Minh City was a
source of conflict. Fortunately, he points out, "they
didn't mind my making a film about the lowest level of
society as long as it was moving towards something that
was a redemption, some sort of peace, some sort of
life. They don't mind so much the darkness as long as
it's balanced out by the light."
The characters in Three Seasons are composites of
people Bui has met over the years. "These were the
people I knew, they were my friends," he says. As seen
through the film, they are rather poignant individuals
striving for a better life with whatever modest means at
hand--whether it's peddling a flashlight, a cyclo ride, or
their bodies. Critic Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles
Times called this "a movie for any and all seasons,
[which] gazes with a sense of beauty and compassion at
hard realities without glossing them over."
Bui's focus on the downtrodden and the indigent was
deliberate. "I wanted to make a film about those most
affected [by change]," the director says. "I wanted to
give them a voice. The things they were telling me were
so interesting, so different from the way I perceived it
growing up in America." Some critics have found Three
Seasons overly pretty and sentimentalized, but for Bui,
Vietnam is a country of hope.
Since much of film-making is done in a cocoon, opening
at Sundance was "very scary and very gratifying," he
says. Scary because hardly anyone had seen it before,
gratifying because it received a standing ovation. "As
the week went by, there was so much buzz about the
film that I knew I was accomplishing one of the
important parts of the process for me," Bui says, "which
was to make a film about some people's lives and to
capture the spirit in a way that would be universal." Bui
had lived up to what Geoffrey Gilmore, a Sundance
official, wrote about the film for the festival catalogue:
"With sweeping directorial vision and a powerful poetic
narrative, Tony Bui has created an enormously
impressive feature debut about the 'new' Vietnam."
This spring the film opened in the United States to
equally laudatory reviews. It also drew $2 million at the
box office, considered exemplary for a foreign-language
film. It is slated to open later this year in Singapore,
Malaysia, Japan, Taiwan and other Asian countries. Bui
is now dodging the temptations of lucrative Hollywood
offers which poured in after his Sundance success. He
continues to focus on personal projects--producing a
film about a Vietnamese refugee camp in the U.S. is
one, directing a film about a dying man's search for
meaning is another.
"There are definitely stories in my mind which will
require a bigger budget," he says, "but right now I want
that creative freedom to do what I really want to do.
Later maybe I'll get that creative freedom on a larger
project after proving myself through a body of work."
Far Eastern Economic Review - August 12, 1999.
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