Varying from glamorous to dilapidated buildings, street alleys, private homes and temples, to cinema halls, shops and restaurants, the “represented or produced spaces” in Three Seasons, this paper argues, serve as tangible referents to a reality that is adapted to accommodate, and in response to the filmmaker’s cross-cultural outlook on Vietnam, a country Bui and his contemporaries would have known only through “American movies and books, all of them in the English language”. Across the unraveling of the film, key cinematic spaces are used to this end, in an effort to spatialise underlying notions of cultural belonging and identity, and the grip of tradition on the rapidly evolving Vietnamese society. To do so, I focus on the use of cinematic space in Three Seasons as a discursive tool to apprehend how the conceptual deployment of contested or imagined spaces is able to contribute to the creation of a nostalgic vision of Vietnam, exoticised by American mainstream movies into a distant, oriental Other. Figure 1 The poster produced for Three Seasonsīeyond the visual artificiality of the film’s brand image, how does the movie actually embody the nostalgic cliché of a bygone Vietnam, which, in post-Đổi Mới 1999 (when the film was first released) was conversely encroaching on Western sentiments? In this paper, I propose that we approach the filmic narrative of Three Seasons from a spatial, or ‘architectural’, perspective to analyse the performative potential of key cinematic spaces. The tagline reads: A haunting tale of changes, choices and second chances. The focal point is an “exotic” female figure wearing a white áo dài. The poster depicts an artificial locale: the foreground is framed by a cascade of red petals on both sides, trees along a quaint, rural path converge. Viewed in this context, the poster promoting Three Seasons, a key visual for the marketing campaign worldwide, is particularly telling. Notwithstanding the film’s large outreach across America and Europe, as well as its several award nominations, it received mixed responses by critics and the public and was criticised for being an “unashamedly sentimental movie” that makes use of fairy tales and stock images to tap into sugar-coated sentiments of lost virtues in the face of globalisation. ![]() Also, in contrast to its American counterparts, Three Seasons is shot entirely in Vietnamese, except for a few sequences in which Harvey Keith, American actor and co-executive producer of the film, appears. Despite being an effectively American production, Three Seasons was granted permission to be fully shot on Vietnamese grounds. Three Seasons, Bui’s first feature film produced when he was only 26 years old, is located at the intersection of cross-cultural encounters. To this end the Vietnam depicted in most of Bui’s production is an idyllic blend of ideals and aesthetics, where “curiosity vies with nostalgia, and reconciliation often overcomes resentment”. ![]() In this effort, shared by the growing Vietnamese diaspora, to counterbalance the predominant American discourse on the war and, also, to learn about Vietnam, a country largely unknown and unfamiliar to the filmmaker and his diaspora, Bui’s cinematic choices have favoured, throughout his career, the depiction of a nostalgic, bygone Vietnam that would allow him to figuratively “translate notions of misery, heritage and history to a diasporic spectatorship”. Ranging from Apocalypse Now (1979) to The Deer Hunter (1978), Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Forrest Gump (1994), to name but a few, mainstream moving images undoubtedly took centre stage in American social culture as a way to acknowledge the trauma of the war with which the American society was struggling to come to terms. Publishers, television reporters, film and music producers contributed to immortalising the war into a “media-myth”. ![]() That is, the war became, in its immediate aftermath, “a resource for the American culture industry”. Belonging to the significant ‘1.5 generation’, Bui was exposed, along with his contemporaries, to the way the United States viewed and represented the war in mainstream culture. Bui left Vietnam with his family at the age of two, following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and spent his formative years in the United States. Three Seasons, by Vietnamese-American film director Tony Bui, was released in the United States in 1999.
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