Cinema
The Scent of Green Papaya
Mùi đu đủ xanh
Trần Anh Hùng · 1993
Synopsis
Saigon, 1951. Mùi, ten years old, arrives from the countryside to work in the house of a family of merchants ruined and abandoned at intervals by a fickle father. She learns the household tasks, watches the ants on a leaf, opens green papayas whose sap beads like milk. Ten years later, the household can no longer afford to keep her and she is placed with a young musician, a friend of the family, whom she had seen passing through when she was a child.
Context
The film was shot entirely at the Bry-sur-Marne studios, where an alley of Saigon and two houses with sliding partitions were rebuilt, including for the scenes set outdoors. This is a choice and not a constraint: the filmmaker has said that he needed to look behind him and give himself a recomposed past rather than a real setting. The film is acted in Vietnamese by performers from the diaspora and from the country, and its author was thirty.
Who it is for
One hundred and four minutes, in subtitled Vietnamese. Almost nothing is said and everything is shown: one has to accept watching gestures rather than following a plot.
Prizes and reception
Caméra d'Or and Youth Prize at Cannes in 1993, César for best first film the following year, and the first Vietnamese film nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film.