The Scent of Green Papaya

A Vietnamese film set in Saigon. Mui is ten when she comes to work as a servant in a merchant family's house. She learns where everything is kept, how the household runs, and what nobody says out loud. The family is coming apart quietly. The father takes the money and disappears for long stretches and comes back; the mother waits and says nothing; a grandmother upstairs has not come down in years. From there almost nothing happens. The film watches the house: water, rice, ants on a step, frogs, papaya sap, the sound of the courtyard. The second half jumps ten years. Mui is grown and goes to work for a young composer, and the film turns quietly toward her. What the narrative is interested in is not events but attention: Mui looks at things closely and the camera adopts her looking, and that is the whole method. There is almost no dialogue and the plot could be written in three sentences. What carries it is texture and sound. The largest fact about the production is that Saigon is not in it. The entire film was built and shot on a soundstage outside Paris, courtyards, plants, insects and all, because shooting in Vietnam was not workable. The city you see is a set. Trần Nữ Yên Khê plays the adult Mui and Man San Lu the child. Trần Anh Hùng directed; it was his first feature. It won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the first Vietnamese film to be. Who it is for: anyone who likes slow films built out of images and sound. Who it is not for: anyone who needs plot; there really is almost none.