Feast for the eyes, not the brain

The Scent of the Green Papaya
A film by Tran Anh Hung
Mandolin Cinema, Sydney
Reviewed by Peter Boyle

This film won two prizes at Cannes 1993 and has been hailed by many critics as a masterful film of Vietnam through Vietnamese eyes. Variety compared Tran Anh Hung to Indian director Satyajit Ray, whose films of India were world acclaimed.

But while The Scent of the Green Papaya is a feast for the eyes and meticulously captures the traditions and rituals of a middle-class family in Saigon 1951, it is flawed by an emigre's sentimentality for his homeland.

Tran left Vietnam when he was 12 and grew up in France. He says he set this film in the 1950s because he had to recreate a “national film past that I did not possess”. It was a psychological necessity, he says.

This film was shot entirely in a studio in France after an abortive attempt to film in Vietnam. The story is of a servant girl, Mui, who works for a benign mistress from the age of 12. All women in the household are bound by rituals of servitude. Later Mui works for a young musician who is a friend of the household; they fall in love, and servant becomes a loving wife.

Tran defends a conservative image of Vietnamese womanhood in this film. Vietnamese women, he believes, are trapped in servitude not just by tradition and the family but by love. Love, he says, empties women's servitude of its alienating content. In love with the man she serves, a woman transcends servitude and rises to a spiritual state where she becomes sacrifice and a gift of self. What crap!

This article was posted on the Green Left Weekly Home Page.
For further details regarding subscriptions and
correspondence please contact glw@greenleft.org.au

Tools

• Bookmark This Page
• Print This Page