The Scent of Green Papaya

Technically, The Scent of Green Papaya is the first feature film from Vietnam to receive wide-spread release in the United States. Actually, it was pri­marily produced by the French and filmed just outside of Paris, with a cast largely composed of nonprofessional actors from the Vietnamese community that flourished in France following the Indochina War.

Even director Tran Anh Hung is Paris-based and, until making this movie, hadn't been near Vietnam in almost 20 years. (The production of this film is a lesson in the increasingly eccentric workings of contemporary foreign cinema.)

Despite its geographic distance from Vietnam, The Scent of Green Papaya is a distinctly Asian film. It has a studied and subdued structure in which little is directly revealed, and its important narrative moments are pieced together with ellipses and subtle nuances.

At its best, The Scent of Green Papaya invokes the legacy of the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. At its most melodramatic, the movie reflects the proto-feminist concerns of Kenji Mizoguchi. Ozu and Mizoguchi are great directors to borrow from, although most American film-goers haven't had the opportunity to learn the differ­ence between an Ozu and an Uzi (the former is quieter).

The Scent of Green Papaya is set in old Saigon during two strategic time periods. The movie begins in 1951, when the fighting between French colonial forces and the Viet Minh (Ho Chi Minh's first band) was escalat­ing. Mui (Lu Man San) is a 10-year-old girl from the countryside who's come to Saigon to work as a servant in the household of a seemingly prosperous Vietnamese family.

This world is tightly bound by tradition. Mui, as cus­tom dictates, is taken under the tutelage of an elderly servant woman (Nguyen Ahn Hoa), who teaches the child the basics of stir-fry cooking and polite obedience. But food and good manners aren't enough to fend off the realities of a family that's falling apart at the seams. The ancient culture the family members have carefully preserved isn't enough to save them from a simmering concoction of past tragedies — tragedies that Mui learns about only in belated bits and pieces.

Jump to 1961, the year that American forces are offi­cially committed to the defense of South Vietnam against the combined forces of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong (Ho Chi Minh's second band). The adult Mui (Tran Nu Yen-Khe) is sent to work for Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a friend of the family that took her in. Khuyen is a European-educated composer with a taste for French music and mores, who suffers from an unrequited interest in Mui.

The Scent of Green Papaya is a slow film that's deeply rooted in Vietnamese customs, so much of it runs the risk of sliding past Western viewers in an elusive haze of obscure rituals. But the movie is worth seeing — its emotional resonance transcends the gap between East and West.