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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