Shimmering Reflections on War By Stephen Hunter Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 14, 1999

Zoe Bui, right, has difficulty accepting Don Duong's support. (October) Director: Tony Bui Cast: Don Duong; Ngoc Hiep Nguyen; Manh Cuong Tran; Harvey Keitel; Zoe Bui Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes Mild sexual innuendo

That's "Three Seasons," by the Vietnamese American director Tony Bui, which is the first American production made in Vietnam since the war.

It's a kind of "Apocalypse a Long Time Ago," in which the war lingers in the air like a vapor, always somehow there, always somehow undefinable, ultimately responsible for nearly everything but at the same time almost unnameable. In the foreground, "Three Seasons" is a delicate mesh of tales – like the dreamscapes you see painted on Asian porcelain – as four characters come to terms with the past, survive the present and look to the future. Each story ends on a note of hope, and each is articulated in a vernacular of visual beauty. In fact, strictly as an exercise in photography, "Three Seasons" is a stunning experience.

In one story, James Hager (Harvey Keitel), a former Marine, has returned to the land where he presumably lost his innocence, in an attempt to find the daughter he fathered. Keitel is quietly spectacular in this story as a man who, in the wintering of late middle age, has discovered an inner need to take responsibility for his life. The best thing about Keitel's character is that he can't really articulate this; the actor makes us feel his yearning through his body, his eyes, while his lines are clotted with frustration and inability to express.

In another, a cyclo driver named Hai (well played by Don Duong) falls in love with a pretty young prostitute, Lan (Zoe Bui, no relation), and expresses that love by essentially becoming her slave and servant. But such uncritical love actually annoys her, when she's used to servicing big-spending Japanese and American businessmen. He struggles to find a way to express his love that will win her heart.

Then a boy of the streets, Woody (Nguyen Huu Duoc), has his case of watches and trinkets stolen and must find it. His is the grimmest story, as he wanders the grotesque venue that Ho Chi Minh City has become, a vast, drunken zone of honky-tonks that cannot be an improvement over the same place before 1975, when it wore the name Saigon.

Finally, the most classic tale follows as a young country girl gets a job picking river lotus for an unseen master, who ultimately is revealed to be a leprous poet, dying by ugly degrees as his fingers fall off and his face swells. There's something of the Beauty and the Beast to this story, which alone seems disconnected from the war. (Until his leprosy was mentioned, I presumed he'd been caught in a napalm strike or breathed a lungful of Agent Orange.)

"Three Seasons" unspools at a stately pace, charting nuance and inflection rather than blast and vibration. It's an art film set in a war zone that lingers long after the reverberations have died in your inner ear.