Three Seasons

Written and directed by a 26-year-old Vietnamese American, helped into production by Harvey Keitel (who gives a startlingly lazy performance as a returning GI) and shot on location in Saigon, this love letter to 'the new Vietnam' plays like a sanitised rehash of Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo for the simple-minded. It has three interwoven storylines, each of them a paragon of subtlety and taste: a lotus-picker bonds with a leper recluse because she warbles songs from his childhood, a cyclo driver falls for a hard-hearted hooker because he senses her inner innocence...you get the idea. The Sundance Festival audience, of course, loved it.