Nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and winner of Golden Camera Award at 1993 Cannes Film Festival, Vietnamese auteur Anh Hung Tran’s superlative Scent of Green Papaya is a sheer visual delight and cinematic treasure to savour. The magical and lyrical movie boasts of one of the most memorable and remarkably sensuous imagery and elegant camera work and is a veritable feast for senses.
The film’s plot, which is almost incidental, tracks the childhood and young adulthood of Mui, who we meet when she is just ten years old, and later on as a young woman of 20, coming to Saigon as a servant girl to a rich merchant’s household. The central core of the Tran’s film is Mui’s emotional development, a process mirrored by the film’s two-act structure — Mui, as a child and later an young, beautiful lass, who is confined to life of servitude. The film also spotlights on her developing relationship with her young and handsome master, a wealthy, French-speaking young composer pianist with his own expensive mistress. Mui, however, silently loves him and gradually the pianist too reciprocates. Thanks to the film’s easy-going, languid and litling pace, it allows one to fully take in all of the subtleties and richness it offers as the magic and wonderment of childhood and later on young adulthood unfurls in this ultimate love lore.
Yes, watch and wonder in awe as eating, sleeping, and staying clean... some of life's most simplest of basic concerns take on a transcendent, ethereal quality in this visually delicious film. What makes Green Papaya so scent-sweet is that it is without guile or subterfuge, as also sans symbols and metaphors and still renders itself as beauteous work of art due to the singularly scintillating cinematography that showcases the lush and lovely sets, and also most especially, the magically playful musical score, which adds an air of whimsy to otherwise mundane moments. Together, the aural and visual delights capture the essence of everyday life in post-colonial Vietnam, which ironically, was filmed in its entirety on a sound stage in Paris. The wholesome, visually intoxicating film endears itself thanks also to the flawless performances and perfectly cast characters, which was first and only role for most, if not all, of the actors. None of them except the character who plays the elder Mui, have gone on to make a second film.
Screening Suchitra Film Society, Wednesday, 6.45 pm, 36, IX Main (B V Karanth Road), Banashankari II Stage. For further details 26711785.
