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What does it say that the year Robert Redford finally conceded Sundance had become a market, there was almost nothing worth buying? Once that might have meant the films were too good to be commercial - but not this time. While the tide of clueless slacker films and Tarantino wannabes has thankfully receded, the 1999 Dramatic Competition saw the vacuum filled by middle-brow, middle-class mediocrity: the triumph of the competent. There was none of the individualist risktaking or vision of films like last year's Buffalo '66 or Pi or even the qualified provocations of High Art, and a sense of deja-vu clung to even the better entries.
The most competent of the competent, Tony Bui's Three Seasons, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, epitomized the current malaise even though superficially it seemed to be something new. Achieving the distinction of being the first American film to be shot in Vietnam, it is content to settle into a mode of comfortable underachievement with a trite triptych of interwoven stories of working-class yearning for connection. A middle-aged cyclo driver in love with a call girl, a flower girl who helps a reclusive, leprosy-afflicted Buddhist master write a final poem, and a child peddler searching for the stolen case of tourist trinkets that is his sole source of income each briefly intersect with an American (Harvey Keitel) searching for the daughter he fathered as a GI 25 years before. The polar opposite of Tran Anh Hung's vibrantly expressionist Cyclo, Vietnamese-American Buis film is shot in subdued earth tones by Lisa Rinzler, who deservedly won the Excellence in Cinematography award. There are a couple of arresting images and moments, but its tasteful, deferential naturalism is scenic and monotonously respectful, its stories simpleminded and devoid of resonance or complexity. A sort of pastiche of recent Asian and Iranian cinema, there's no authenticity in its reheated neorealist humanism and received notions of reconciliation and redemption. It's a perfect creature of the Sundance ethos - nurtured in its annual M riting and directing labs and in thrall to the Sundance Prime Directive, which dictates respect for the "integrity" of a foreign culture but conversely a homogenizing universality. As such, it flattered the Sundance New Age liberal audience's well--...
