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Sunday, January 5, 2014

Sunday Review: The Scent of Green Papaya

Ever green

By Morris Dean

The best argument for reviewing a 20-year-old film is the 20-year-old film The Scent of Green Papaya ["Mùi du du xanh" in Vietnamese] (1993, directed by Tran An Hung, then 31 years old)—lest you too missed it then, as did we.
    We watched it via Netflix instant download this week. The title was so familiar, I thought we had seen it. But, no, only heard about it, probably because it was nominated for the 1993 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A gift missed then became a gift received now!

    The film's lush domestic beauty—set almost entirely in a Vietnamese merchant courtyard-household in the 1950s—mesmerized us both in minutes. As the late, great film critic Roger Ebert (1943-2013) wrote in 1994:
Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music...seen through the eyes of a poor young woman who is taken as a servant into the household of a merchant family. [Mui] observes everything around her in minute detail...learns her tasks quickly and well, and performs them so unobtrusively that sometimes she seems almost like a spirit...uncomplaining, all-seeing, and the film watches her world through her eyes. For her, there is beauty in the smallest details: A drop of water trembling on a leaf, a line of busy ants, a self-important frog in a puddle left by the rain, the sunlight through the green leaves outside the window, the scent of green papaya.
Man San Lu as Mui age 10
    Mui is a girl rather than a young woman when she enters the service depicted in the first half of the film. She is so open and accepting of her surroundings, it is hard to tell what her own reaction is to some quirks of the merchant family: the fact that the father has on several occasions taken all of the household's money and gone off with one mistress or another, the mother's regarding Mui as a stand-in for her daughter who died, the younger son's uninhibited acts of staring at Mui and urinating into a kitchen storage vessel in her plain sight, both sons' strikingly different attitude from Mui's toward the ants....
    Are we being told that while dysfunction surrounds Mui, she is exempt from it through her devotion to doing good service and loving the world as she finds it?
Tran Nu Yên-Khê (the director's wife)
as Mui age 20
    It could be. A change in the family's circumstances owing to the death of the father leads to her going to the household of a younger man who had already become acquainted with Mui through his friendship with the merchant family's older son. She is twenty now, and he not much older, a classical musician, a man of leisure with a coquettish mistress whose antennae are up for signs of any interest he may have in a servant of about her own age, who, we are shown by way of contrast to an earlier scene in which child Mui merely admires the hundreds of small white seeds inside a green papaya, will now as a young woman drop a papaya seed into her master's soup....

    There is one long sequence showing Mui examining objects in his private rooms, even stepping into his shoes, and his going from room to room, slowly, quietly, looking for her as she hides from room to room and around corners. The power of these minutes of films is extraordinary: the power of visual and aural beauty (the soundtrack), the emotional power of romantic desire....
    Twenty years later the film is still a gift, and in at least one way a greater gift—in its contrast to so many loud, fast-paced, silly movies today.
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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6 comments:

  1. This film is even more of a gift now than it was 20 years ago. If you missed it then, treat yourself now.

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  2. [via email to the author:]

    What's your top ten list of the films you saw on DVD or streaming in 2013? I see my Netflix queue has dwindled to two (one of which is your suggestion from today; I didn't read the review yet because I didn't want to spoil seeing the film.)
        Somehow my DVDs from Netflix sit on the coffee table for months without being viewed—not a very good use of my subscription. I'm still doing my best to see two films a week in a theatre; this holiday season I think we've seen about eight. Just saw Philomena yesterday evening.

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    Replies
    1. Jon, thanks for your very interesting query.
          Since I no longer keep a list of literally everything I watch (or give up watching because I found it UBOO—unwatchably bad or otherwise offputting) and Netflix's list of what I've watched goes back only a few months apparently, I'm not able to give you a top-ten list for 2013. (My memory for what I've seen is murky, which was why I kept a list for a long time; it was just becoming too obsessive and time-consuming, so I gave it up.)
          But in looking at my recent Netflix downloads, I did see one that you likely haven't seen or even heard of, King of Devil's Island, with Stellan Skarsgard. I highly recommend it. Sort of a boys version of a movie we saw about that awful Magdalen Sisters convent for wayward girls. Also, have you tried Netflix's TV series, Lilyhammer, starring and co-written by Steven Van Zandt? We really enjoyed it, both seasons. The second came out only less than two months ago. Orange Is the New Black was quite good also. Getting On (adapted from British TV) is must-see—black humor, sort of a Waiting for God from the staff's point of view rather than the inmates. On HBO. (We like TV series, as you may perceive. Oh, Veep, with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, is very entertaining. Also on HBO.)
          Our county public library system website doesn't show me what I've checked out, so I can't use that as a history source, unfortunately.
          I am amazed that you let DVDs from Netflix sit around for longer than just a single day. We subscribed to DVDs for a long time, and we ALMOST NEVER failed to return a DVD the next day there was a mail pickup. Maybe once, at most twice.
          We used to go to a movie theater at least once a year (usually around Christmas or Dec. 31), but this year we just owned up to the fact that we really DON'T LIKE going to movie theaters.
          Oh, have you watched Kenneth Branagh's 5-hour Hamlet? We've watched it four or five times. Also, I recently watched Jos Whedon's Much Ado about Nothing and found it very interesting. You might or might not like it. I can't say I HIGHLY recommend it, but I do recommend it to someone with sufficient intellect and patience and knowledge of the play. Clueless? My wife says that's THE BEST adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Emma there is. Persuasion? That's her favorite adaptation of ANY novel by Jane Austen. We've watched it four or five times also.
          If I think of other things to recommend (and I likely will), I'll let you know.

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    2. [again, via email:]

      Part 1 of 2:

      Though it started out as a non list, Mo, your reply grew to offer some intriguing possibilities, some of which I'd heard of, but most of which I hadn't seen and added to my Netflix list.
          Well, yes, I do let DVDs from Netflix sit around; I used to let Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos sit around too (one totally defunct, the other on its way out) even after I had seen them. The difference is that the charges don't pile up because I'm a procrastinator. Why is that [that I procrastinate]? Well, sometimes, there doesn't seem to be the time, or I just lose enthusiasm for the disc, which often wasn't at the top of a list, mine or anyone else's, just vaguely interested me. The last time I made a serious effort to enhance (=enlarge) my list, I typed in "100 best recent films" to Google and picked from what seemed likely in the results. I watched Forks over Knives, a documentary that was different and fascinating, and essentially wrongheaded and outrageous. There was about a 30-page web analysis of its medical, scientific, and logical faults, including why the cancer rate in Norway seemed to drop because the Nazis removed fresh fruits and vegetables from the market, to feed the German population. Have you seen this? Took me a long time to get the title, too. Of course I've seen my share of very bad movies by picking out unseen and unheard of titles at video stores, with great stars and some key marketing words: in addition to being unseen and unheard by me, they must have been unseen and unheard by billions, in addition to being unutterably unviewable. Great stars, duh, do a lot of things for, uh, money.

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    3. Part 2 of 2:

          But I'm rambling . . . those flics sit on the coffee table because there is no great need to return them (no charge, no imminent need for the next film, a short queue) and because one or two of them I'm still hoping to actually stick in the Blu-ray player and watch. But don't. I used to have Netflix streaming, but that led to frequent technical problems and also choosing some very bad films, which I didn't have much control over playing.
          I saw Clueless when it came out, in a theatre, and then again in a rerun in some form. A truly imaginative film. I think I've seen all the contemporary film versions of Austen's novels, and have read most of them, though Emma is certainly the finest. They have great and satisfying plots, but the prose on the page is so witty that films skip a great deal. They are satisfying—one offshoot, The Jane Austen Book Club, was, like a very few films, set in Sacramento, and so that had additional cachet and intrigue. So was one scene from Frances Ha because its title character and the actress who portrays her grew up here, and we met her parents at the Sacramento premiere. Another digression. Almost more digressions than Tristram Shandy—it's hard to believe but they actually made a film of that, not half bad.
          I think I am Hamletted out: read it about eight times in college and high school, have seen 1-1/2 films, maybe more if you add Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead [by Tom Stoppard] to the list. I don't think Shakespeare makes it very well to the screen—though there are exceptions, like Branagh and Olivier, and covert insertions, like in My Own Private Idaho, or versions of The Tempest in various genres, including one with a robot on a distant planet. There's a Greenaway version [Prospero's Books (1991)] that is very postmodern and complex.
          But aside from the slow return of DVDs, I can see another difference in our viewing preferences. You like TV, DVD, at home. We like, yes like, movie theaters. It's dark and quiet: if you're lucky and no one's checking their cellphone for messages, you can be entranced (almost literally) by a good film. The screen is about 10 times bigger. Usually there's no pauses in the middle while you get up to answer a phone call or go to the bathroom, or fall asleep. Though my wife gets some of her best sleep in movie theaters. Anyway, I see probably 50+ films a year that way. That is, after all, the way most are intended to be seen. Try to think of movies somewhat like stage plays: there's something to be said for the locale, the intensity of the moment, the ritual and protocol that go along with it. But you're also right, there are probably more viewers like you than like me.

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    4. Jon, thanks for your thoughtful, if Shandyesque <grin> reply! Ha, I hear what you're saying about watching bad stuff. We of course wade through preliminary minutes of many of those but usually have the presence of mind to return soon to shore and try something else.
          While I can agree, theoretically, with your reasons for watching movies in a theater, we just dislike, yes dislike movie theaters. The pauses in the middle are of our choice and for our comfort.
          Yes, I saw Forks over Knives, but I don't remember ever figuring out the significance of the title. I think I fell into the trap and over-praised the film. But I err not infrequently.
          We're watching the biopic "Hamsun" (1996) about the last 17 years of the life of Norwegian Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun [1859-1952], which we're finding fascinating, very informative, and entertaining as well. Max von Sydow plays Hamsun. (Netflix instant download)

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