amadbrownwoman

i just watched the scent of green papaya and i thought i might as well write a movie review. i know, i know, this movie was released a thousand years ago, not exactly recent, who cares i love it.

you know what will draw you in to watch this movie? it's a visual feast: lush colors, sensuous images, verdant foliage, flowing waters as the camera zooms in and zooms out, the slow pace which makes everything more intense, somehow more beautiful. pure visual orgasm! you know what will draw you not to watch this movie? lush colors, sensuous images, verdant foliage, flowing waters as the camera zooms it and zooms out, the slow pace which makes everything more intense somehow more beautiful. pure visual orgasm!

there comes a point when you just want to shout enough! i get it! it's a visually beautiful movie, each and every scene is painstakingly beautiful but i want to know more of the story, i want to know how it will end, now!

of course it would be great if the director is around just to suffer my verbal abuse but no such luck. in fact, while i was watching this movie, a never ending almost 24 hour construction was going on. it has been going on since i moved to this apartment, it has been going on years before i moved to this building and i have a reason to believe that it will go on for years and years after i get out of vietnam. it's a curse. it will never end. which is not the case of this movie. it ends just at that time when you start thinking the story is not advancing anymore. sigh of relief. at which time you'd be saying, more than an hour and a half was not wasted, that was an impressive movie. because it is. and its greatness rests on its cinematic style.

it is set during the french colonization of vietnam. the child mui arrives in saigon to work as a servant for a home which could not escape from its grief because of the death of the daughter. the father who has the habit of taking off with the family's money and jewelry was again away when the daughter died. which is why he blames himself for the death of the daughter. the mother grieves for her daughter and when mui arrives, she sees in mui her own daughter. which is why she treats mui as she would her own daughter. the two young boys deals with the grief of their parents in their own way. the grandmother spends her life in front of the family altar praying for the husband who died decades ago. and also there is one older son whose only role is to provide friendship to khuyen who will become an important character later on.

in contrast to this, mui settles in her domestic life as a servant and finds peace in the everyday routine, doing her chores, and in nature. cue shots of birds and leaves and plants and seeds. i have to say, the child actress is portrays this so well. she stares at the white seeds of young papaya, camera zoom in on the papaya seeds, camera zoom out and by god i gobble it up, i stare at her face and i could see it, that innocent happiness.

then ten years later. the father is now gone. the grandmother is gone. one of the son is away being a writer and the other is married. that older son in the story is now gone, but only because he's not relevant anymore. mui who is now a young woman with really great cheek bones remains at the house as the servant. due to financial difficulties, the mother is forced to let mui work at another house. she hands to mui the heirlooms she would have given to to her own daughter. the rest of the movie centers on the developing romance between mui and her new master khuyen, a young, wealthy piano composer. how he became wealthy being a piano composer i do not know. but that's how the story goes. mui still does that staring into everyday inanimate objects and finding happpines bit, however she just looks retarded when she does this.

it was at this point that i started wanting to paint my toes a fuck me red nail polish. yawn. mui with the great cheek bones is such a disappointment. in a movie which is almost silent, in which she has about one or two lines, the only facial expression i saw in is retardedness.

the director's earnestness to be politically neutral is naive. despite the setting being the time of the french colonization in vietnam, there is no criticism of the influences of france on local culture. the father who plays local music with his local house with its local accoutrements leaves the family with all the money and jewelry. on the other hand, khuyen who plays western music on his piano with his affluent house with all the right western touches is portrayed as mui's prince charming. it's these turns that makes me want to snarkily applaud, what a great colonial! (chao, monsieur regisseur!) there is also a feeling of nostalgia in its portrayal of saigon. in an effort to be neutral, the director was betrayed by his lenses.

the scent of green papaya (l'odeur de la papaye verte) 1993
mui At 20: tran nu yen-khe
mui At 10: lu man san
mother: truong thi loc
written and directed By tran anh hung

what would i do without you, vietnam translators?

b movie par excellence. one reason i watch comedies even if low budget, in fact especially because it's a low budget is the honesty in showing what a particular culture deem entertaining.

the movie starts with about thirty minutes of some of the most boring shit you've ever seen on films, although of course i'm used to philippine b movies so it is NOT the the case for me how a woman falls in love with a guy, zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, who has nothing going for him except for the fact that he comes from a rich family, but of course in the movie since he's that, he's a catch, then woman got pregnant, guy wants her to get an abortion and so starts the comedy part. woman didn't want to get abortion so she ran away from the abortion clinic, guy runs after her, get into an accident and because of that accident, becomes bedridden for several months. while bedridden, he starts having dreams in which the gender roles of men and women switches all because the men are the ones getting pregnant. it was supposed to be funnny. i found it too simplistic to even be funny: gender roles does not happen because one is having the kids and not the other, even in heterosexual relationships without kids, married, not married, and in homosexual relationships, there exist taking on gender roles. so wtf.


so i said in previous post to not watch this film. that's the verdict, do. not. watch. there is a limit to my love of cheese. okay, if you just gotta, well then watch it if only for:

(1) the one scene that cracked me up, must you guess, it was sex or to be particular, the metaphor to sex: car keys will have a different meaning to me, now on. it was not supposed to be funny but since it's not supposed to be funny, it cracked me up. what the hell, that's me. i've been numbed by socially conscious philippine movies with its in your face f* it til you drop f*ing scenes which is why i found it ingenious.

(2) the abortion clinic with its imagery of a butcher shop. abortion was made to look so brutal in this movie. i swear this is what every woman in the whole world think of abortion. but just about anything that involves doctors and nurses and hospital assistants and the assistants to the assistants' poking and prodding in that region is so invasive it's brutal to me.