What this film lacks is as important to understanding and appreciating it as are its strengths. The Scent of Green Papaya follows a design in the minimalist tradition, whereby a work of art is stripped of several of the qualities usually expected by an audience in order to more fully accentuate and explore the remaining quality or qualities. Critics and audiences typically judge films based on such attributes as plot, character development, script and dialogue, cinematography, score, message, emotional impact, direction, and acting – not necessarily in that order. Does it follow that a great film is one that achieves a high level of success in all of those attributes? Can a film be great if it intentionally minimizes the scope of several of those attributes for the express purpose of expanding our awareness of what remains and developing those residual qualities to a deeper than typical level? This is what The Scent of Green Papaya attempts to do.

Whether its conceptual premise works for you will depend entirely on your willingness to forgo certain usual film qualities in order to more fully bask in others that are elevated very near to perfection. This film possesses little plot, very little character development, and minimal dialogue. It places less than typical demand on its actors and actresses for exceptional performances. It provides no scenic panoramas despite being set in an exotic southeast Asian locale. Instead, The Scent of Green Papaya is a subtle and exquisitely detailed miniature painting. It is the view of existence seen in a microscope that reveals more fundamental layers of being than are usually within reach of awareness. And through this deepening of perspective, The Scent of Green Papaya raises profound sociological questions while charming us like a rapturous Debussy tone poem.

The film is divided into two distinct sections, the first part occupying about two-thirds of the film’s length. The plot, such as it is, involves ten-year-old Mui, a sweet girl with bright eyes and a radiant smile, who is sent by her poor family from the provinces to be a servant for a middle-class merchant family in the Saigon of 1951. The household is comprised of the master of the house and father of the family (Ngoc Trung Tran), his wife (Thi Loc Truong), three sons, a grandmother (the father’s mother), and an elderly servant woman. Mui is taught her duties by the elderly servant and gradually learns both the superficial practices of the household and its hidden secrets.

Mui’s duties include mainly cleaning and food preparation, especially the preparation of the green papaya. The writer and director of the film, Tran Anh Hung, had this to say, from her own childhood experiences in Vietnam, about the symbolic significance of the green papaya and the film’s title: “Everyone knew the gestures associated with the preparation of the papaya and, since the houses weren’t soundproofed, you often heard it being prepared in the house next door. You knew the sound because the papaya is hollow and when you hit it (with a knife), it makes a very characteristic noise. . . . Since the green papaya was a vegetable prepared by women, it immediately becomes a symbol of women’s work.”

Mui begins to understand that the superficial tranquility of the household masks concealed problems. The master of the household periodically disappears from the household for a binge of drinking and womanizing, taking with him all of the family’s money. His wife bears these absences stoically and must scrounge, with the aid of the old servant, to hold the household together without monetary resources. During one such previous bender, the family had lost the life of their only daughter to illness. Consequently, the mother is racked by grief and the father by guilt. The mistress of the household has taken a shine to Mui, partly because she resembles the lost daughter in both appearance and age. The grandmother lives upstairs in perpetual mourning and isolation, despite the humorously pathetic romantic interest on the part of a would-be suitor. The youngest son, Tin, is an unruly brat while the middle son is sullen and withdrawn. The oldest son, Trung, has a friend, Khuyen (Hoa Hoi Vuong) who is sometimes a dinner guest. He is a pianist and a composer and somewhat more Westernized than the others. Mui secretly finds him fascinating and attractive. The first segment of the film ends when tragedy strikes the family in the form of death of the head of the household.

The second part of the film opens ten years later, with Mui (Yên-Khê Tran) now a young woman of twenty. She is released from service by the family for whom she has worked for many years due to their declining economic circumstances. She now becomes the servant of Khuyen. What little plot exists in this film now emerges. Khuyen is earnest, melancholy, and aesthetic. He receives frequent visits from a mistress who dresses stylishly but is somewhat vulgar, shallow, and self-centered, in obvious contrast to the lovely, sensitive, and selfless Mui. Viewers now participate in the age old romantic diversion of watching and waiting for the poor boy to take off the blinders and notice the beautiful and worthy girl, already part of his household, who loves him dearly. Obviously, we are not to be disappointed. With so little plot to work with, why cheat this one element?

In explicating the plot, however, I have revealed nothing, yet, about the essence of this film. This is a film about observation and ideas rather than plot. The entire film is told through Mui’s perspective, with her acute sense of awareness. Mui is an observer of life’s tiny mysteries just as we, as viewers of the film, are observers. Mui is our alter ego in this experience; we see through her eyes. She closely examines a drop of sap quivering on a leaf. Later, she watches ants, marveling at the size of the load that one carries. She savors her chores rather than hastening through them. She watches a sunbeam glistening on a papaya tree. She is downright elegant in the simplicity of her inner life. Even at age 20, Mui examines the shine on her master’s shoes and every object of his household. She radiates with an inner peace and appreciation of life’s subtle detail. All of this is filmed with great attention to beauty and color. At the very moment that the viewer is enraptured by a small detail beautifully magnified, the camera moves in for a still deeper perspective, revealing yet another level of design. This stunning visual depth is what the relative absence of plot and character development and other sacrifices of conventional cinematic qualities has allowed to burst into the foreground. This is the payoff! We almost feel that we can smell the papaya through Mui’s nose! There is little dialogue to distract. The pace is slowed to a crawl to allow time for these observations, but the pace of this film is measured in heartbeats rather than ticks on our watches.

So, the tremendous visual beauty is one virtue of this film. It also subtly raises several profound sociological questions, without ever being overtly political in its message. Amazingly, it raises these questions without a single word of dialogue being overtly directed to such issues. One such matter is the intersection of traditional Vietnamese culture with Western influences. Life in Vietnam was undergoing rapid change in the 1950’s and 1960’s in response to the incursion of French and then American culture. The household in which the young Mui works is traditional Vietnamese in its décor, with many antiques hanging and sitting about. The music played in the household is traditional Vietnamese music. Later, we see Mui at age 20 in Khuyen’s household, with its piano, some Western furnishings, his Western dress and that of his mistress, and Khuyen’s taste for and composition of Western classical music. It is the traditional Vietnamese household that has fallen into economic distress from which Mui must depart into the Westernized household of Khuyen that remains economically viable. As an ironic further manifestation of the inevitably of the destruction of traditional cultures in the face of modern ones, the production team for The Scent of Green Papaya had to recreate the interior settings on a French soundstage because, among other reasons, they were unable to find intact traditional middle class 1950’s style Vietnamese households when the film was shot in the early 1990’s.

One aspect of changing culture that is particularly relevant to an understanding of this film relates to the role of women. In traditional Vietnamese culture, the role of women was largely one of subordination and servitude. This is exemplified not only by the cleaning and food-preparation chores of the servants, but even in the stoicism that the mistress of the household must endure in relation to her husband’s thoughtless philandering and squandering of household resources. At the same time, it is evident that Mui’s capacity for selfless devotion to the family she serves is later manifested in the quality of the love she has for Khuyen and is part of what renders her irresistible to him. By contrast, Khuyen’s mistress is more superficially “liberated”, not only in her speech and dress but by her self-centeredness as well. In this modern, Westernized perspective that promotes gender equality, her needs are as important as Khuyen’s. On the other hand, she lacks real capacity for caring or nurturing. In the end, Khuyen chooses the traditional, nurturing kind of women – which might seem like a negative message vis a vis equality – but on closer inspection, we understand that the notion being advanced is one of blending traditional culture with modern enlightenments. We see, in the final scene, that Khuyen is teaching Mui to read, apparently intending not to exploit her as a servant-wife but to elevate her to the status of a wife-on-equal-footing. At least one can optimistically hope so. If one is inclined to explore even more deeply into the questions thus raised, one might wonder whether literacy might not “spoil” the near perfect harmony and unity that Mui already exhibits through her great perceptiveness. That then leads to thoughts about pragmatic Western philosophy versus the introspective Eastern mentality and what happens when the two collide. It is greatly to this film’s credit that it can excite such questions without a word of dialogue on these topics.

The Scent of Green Papaya was the creation of a Vietnamese native, Tran Anh Hung, who served the project as both writer and director. Hung relocated in France in 1975. Although preproduction research was conducted in Vietnam, the film was ultimately shot entirely on soundstages in France. That decision was necessitated in part by practical considerations, including the inevitable lack of interest on the part of the Vietnam government of the 1990’s on reliving its colonial past. At the same time, it proved an aesthetic advantage, given Hung’s conception, by allowing control of the most intimate details of set, lighting, camera positions, and sound effects. The visual perfection of the film could probably not have been achieved outside the studio setting. It the end, the settings are fully credible to viewers, providing a clear sense of being in a Saigon neighborhood.

The performance by Lu Man San as the young Mui is utterly endearing. She conveys a radiance despite her character being shy and introspective. The range of her facial expressions is extraordinary. Yên-Khê Tran, who was the fiancée of the director at the time of the shooting, is less satisfying as the older Mui, but certainly comely enough for the romantic element. It is a tougher job to render the innocence and curiosity of Mui in a credible way at age twenty than at age ten. The rest of the roles are not especially challenging, with the paucity of dialogue, but the performances are generally adequate.

The Scent of Green Papaya was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film category in 1993, though it lost out, in the end, to a Spanish film, La Belle Epoque, something of a miscarriage of justice, in my opinion, since there were at least two foreign films better than the winner in that year, including this one. Hung did not walk away empty-handed, however, receiving the prestigious Camera D’Or award at the Cannes Festival. The Scent of Green Papaya succeeds in immersing its viewer in a world of sumptuous detail, precisely because it sacrifices many of the other cinematic qualities that viewers typically expect. In so doing, the film has preserved a vision of a traditional culture that has since been overtaken by events and bombed into oblivion.


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You might want to check out this other excellent film from Vietnam:

Cyclo

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older