The film opens with Kien An (Nguyen Ngoc Hiep) being admitted to a suburban walled compound where she will work picking white lotuses to sell on the streets of Saigon. This young woman joins her co-workers in the daily harvest on a small pond that is faced by a large foreboding house occupied by the Teacher Dao (Tran Manh Cuong), who has not been seen in public for many years. Someone tells her that it is his ghost who lives there. Their work is of a primeval nature, perhaps unchanged for a thousand years or more. They row across the pond in tiny rowboats, pick the beautiful white flowers, while singing work songs. One day, to the resentment of the more senior lotus-pickers, Kien An adds new verses which have more depth and subtlety than the simple verses usually sung.

Teacher Dao hears her new verses and bids his servant bring the young woman to see him. She discovers that the man, of an indeterminate age, is confined to a wheelchair. He is in the advanced stages of leprosy and his fingers have been eaten away by the disease. He tells her that she will be his fingers and begins to compose new poems that she spends each day transcribing. Their partnership gives meaning to their lives. What can not change is her daily chores on the pond and on the streets of Saigon. This simple laborer's life is being wasted, as her master's is wasting away due to disease.

The next pair includes James Hager (Harvey Keitel), a Vietnam veteran who sits outside his hotel each day staring into the windows of the "Apocalypse Now" disco, where he believes he will find the daughter he left behind in the war. That is where he met her mother, who has recently died. One night he runs into a street kid Woody (Nguen Huu Duoc), who survives by selling trinkets out of a folding case. As Hager spills out his story to the young boy over a beer in the disco late one night, the lights go out suddenly. When they come on again, the case is missing. For Woody, this is as much of a blow as the loss of the bicycle in the neo-realist classic "Bicycle Thief," which was also set in a grim postwar urban setting. Woody assumes that Hager has stolen the case and spends his days wandering around the city searching for the American and his case. Meanwhile, Hager continues his search for his daughter.

The casting of Keitel is no accident. He lent his considerable clout in the industry as Executive Producer in order to make the film happen. The only thing he got in exchange was the privilege to act in one of his most powerful roles to date. Keitel has long been associated with independent films like "Three Seasons" and deserves enormous credit for making this latest one happen. Nguen Huu Duoc, like the young star of "Central Station," was also a non-professional who the director discovered on the streets of the city doing exactly what he does in the film: selling trinkets. Both films are about the desperate situation of children and it is a sign of the integrity of the films' creators that they made this casting decision.

The final pair, who really define the dramatic and emotional core of the film, are Hai (Don Duong), a pedicab driver and Lan (Zoë Bui), the woman he falls in love with--a prostitute. When he first meets her, she is running from a bar after having an altercation with a client. Lan offers to drive her home and falls in love with her instantly. From that moment on, he follows her everywhere, just to be near her and to be able to drive her home. While she at first appreciates his solicitousness, after a while she becomes annoyed. What does he want from her? She is so used to having men treat her like a piece of meat that she can not relate to someone who loves her for herself. She tries to wise him up. She points at one of the new hotels and lectures him. You see that place? The people who stay there look nothing like us. They have money and we have none. Someday when I have money I will join them and leave all this behind.

Hai does not know how to respond to her. There really is no answer, because the new Vietnam is based on money and nothing else. The only hope is to find a job with a multinational corporation or sell your flesh. Lan is the realist. This does not prevent Hai from continuing to pursue her. When he finally wins $200 in a pedicab race, he uses $50 to buy Lan's services. When they go up to a hotel room, he only asks her to remove her makeup, change into a nightgown that he's bought her, and go to sleep. When she awakes, she discovers that he has gone without touching her.

Perhaps the only person capable of making such a film is Tony Bui, the writer and director who fled the country with his family in 1970 when he was two years old. He visited Vietnam in 1994 and developed what he described as a passion for the country. He explains that, "A driving force for me was to make a film in Vietnamese with Vietnamese actors and to tell a modern story. Growing up I only saw the Vietnamese in war films, as faceless people running through the jungles with guns. That's not what I saw when I went there. I wanted to bring out their humanity in a way that hasn't been shown, the universality of the human spirit."