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Scent of Green Papaya, The (aka: Mui Du Du Xanh) (DVD + Soundtrack CD)
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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: DD 2.0, DD 5.1 Video Format: Widescreen 1.66:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: Vietnamese Subtitles: English, Chinese Region Code: ALL Year Made: 1993 Running Time: 100
 A story of beauty, passion and forbidden fruit.
A love story of exquisite beauty and originality, The Scent of Green Papaya is the Cannes favorite that won the coveted Camera d'Or and was nominated for the Academy AwardR for Best Foreign Language Film of 1993.
Tran Anh Hung's film is beautiful. Its colors are still, hushed, andtranslucent. Limpid greens and abundant yellows, deep blues, the pearlywhiteness found inside papayas. The film's tones and textures seem to slowthe storyline, drenching it with a kind of denseness, a sense of ongoinghistory.
Set in Saigon during the 1950s and early '60s, _The Scent of GreenPapaya_ is necessarily conflicted beneath this calm surface. Before theAmerican War, Vietnam was not divided into North and South, but its classand political systems were already in trouble.
The film's nostalgia is troubling in two ways. First, its version ofa more decorous era is based in large part on upper class yearnings fororder and obedience. Second, as Tran has said in interviews, he sees thisperiod as a time when Vietnam's social categories were intact, before"women's rights'' destroyed the domestic contract: in his film, women knowtheir place and are, at least on the surface, settled (if not entirelyhappy) in it.
Financed and filmed in France (the Vietnamese-born director, Tran,was raised and educated in Paris), _Scent_ represents this period ofVietnam's history from a distance. It relies on a belief that the good olddays were indeed "good,'' that traditional hierarchies were equallyrevered by dominant and oppressed groups.
 _The Scent of Green Papaya_ presents the limitations of class andgender through its central character, a young servant girl, Mui (for thefirst half of the movie, ten-year-old Mui is played by Lu Man San; duringthe second part, set in 1961, the actor is Tran Nu Yen-Khe). Mui's quietacceptance of her "place'' is never overtly addressed by the film as aproblem; she is the still, serene center of a world in the midst ofupheaval. What's interesting but also troubling is the film's apparentinvestment in this nostalgia. While we--a current U.S. audience--might seethat Mui is trapped by her cultural boundaries, she never expressesdiscontent. In this way, the film allows diverse viewer responses, even asits own political position seems regressive.
As the film opens she is sent by her village-bound family to work foran upper class family in Saigon. During this first section, impeccablysmooth tracking shots mapping the expanses of the expensive home whileindicating its unknown corners and claustrophic back rooms. Lu is perfectas the child; her dark, deep eyes register her wonder and surprise at thefreedoms of her masters. She witnesses the family's many, unspokentroubles: a young daughter who died, a father (Tran Ngoc Trung) whodisappears for weeks and months at a time, and a mother (Truong Thi Loc)who suffers silently as her mother-in-law berates her inability to pleaseher son.
Mui observes such goings-on without comment, acting as our guide tothe desperation, decadence, and pained self-involvement of the upperclass. Almost immediately, she is targeted by the family's youngest sonTin (Neth Gerard), who continually finds ways to torment her, fromknocking over her scrub bucket to leaving live lizards in the expensivevases she is required to dust. Carefully counselled in cooking,house-cleaning, and complete obedience by the older woman servant, Thi(Nguyen Anh Hoa), Mui accepts her place with a mysterious, apparentlyinfinite, patience. Her sense of place and self is made clear in herdevotion to her pet, a cricket in a delicate cage.
As a child, Mui is visibly smitten with the wealthy family's olderson's friend, Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a handsome composer. In 1961, whenthe family loses its status and money, she is sent to work for Khuyen. Hersubservience to him is part ritual, part masculinist romance, part"girlish'' lovesickness: she prepares his meals and cleans up after him.Khuyen works over his piano by day and cavorts with a more "modern'' woman(she wears lipstick and teases her hair) at night.
Given the girlfriend's forwardness, it becomes clear that Khuyen'sattraction to Mui is based, in part, on a yearning for traditionalstructures. He appreciates her silence, her compliance. Where hisgirlfriend demands his sexual and emotional attention, Mui waits for himin her servant's quarters, shy, yet devoted and willing, a fantasy womanwho is hardly specific to Vietnamese culture.
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