The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie Review

Vietnam as we rarely see it.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater April 27, 2011

Winner of the Caméra d'Or prize at the 1993 Cannes festival and nominated the same year for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Film category, The Scent of Green Papaya is the meditative, stunningly beautiful debut from Vietnamese-French director Tran Anh Hung, whose first three films—Papaya, the Tony Leung-starring Cyclo (1995) and The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000)—comprise what many critics have referred to as his “Vietnam trilogy,” thematically concerned with life in the post-colonial communist country in the latter half of the 20th century. And yet, the three films are largely apolitical; rather than broaching the Big Issues we often associate with Vietnam, the director tells perceptive, unpresumptuous slice-of-life stories about families, siblings, and lovers. These are intimate dramas—not necessarily social commentaries—that deal in universal emotions, even as they’re rooted in the “exotic” culture and traditions of Vietnam. This is especially true in The Scent of Green Papaya, a film that’s redolent with the sounds and smells of southeast Asia, but was in fact shot entirely on a soundstage in France.

Trân Nu Yên-Khê as Mui

The two-part film opens in pre-war Saigon, 1951, as quiet, curious ten-year-old Mui (Man San Lu) arrives at the upper-middle-class household where she’s been hired as a servant girl. Taken under the wing of an elder maid—whose tiring lifetime of servitude is suggested in her admission that she “hasn’t dreamt for years”—Mui learns the ins and outs of the home’s domestic routine. She makes breakfast and does the laundry. She washes floors, pestered by the family’s bratty (and flatulent) youngest son, and carries trays of food up to the grandmother, who spends her days mourning and meditating in her shrine-like bedroom. Intimations of death and sadness are contrasted with the otherwise clean, sunny vibe of the open-air house, and we eventually learn their source. The father (Ngoc Trung Tran) has a history of taking the family’s savings and disappearing for weeks on end to blow it on women and drink, leaving his wife (Thi Loc Truong) to run their textile business and scrape together enough money for rice and other expenses. Sometime in the past, after one of these notorious benders, he returned to find his young daughter—who would’ve been Mui’s age —dead of a sudden illness. Since then, he’s been depressed and withdrawn, and when he disappears again, his wife—unsurprised—goes into protect- and-provide mode, hoping to sell enough fabric to maintain her family’s lifestyle.

We witness these events from Mui’s ever-observant perspective, and along with gradually revealing the family’s emotional dynamics, director Tran Anh Hung spends much of this first section of the film lingering on the details that catch Mui’s eye—the slow drip of white sap from a papaya tree, crickets trapped in an earthenware jar, an old man who stops in an alley and looks up when he’s unexpectedly illuminated by a street light. Like the tie between smell and memory, this succession of images evokes continuous changes in feeling. As its title implies, The Scent of Green Papaya is a highly sensual experience, in every sense of the word.

When the film jumps forward ten years, the long-in-decline family can no longer afford to keep twenty-year-old Mui (Trân Nu Yên-Khê) employed, so the mother—who has come to see Mui as a stand-in for her dead daughter—regretfully sends her to work for Khuyen (Hua Hoi Vuong), a classical pianist and one of the father’s former friends. Independently wealthy, Khuyen lives alone but is visited periodically by his socialite fiancé, who teases him about his new maid. You can probably see where this is going—a romance between Mui and Khuyen—but their mutual desire for one another is less predictable than it is inevitable, almost fated, and it plays out in a poignant, nearly wordless series of events. The director seems rather unconcerned with both plot and dialogue—there’s a good twenty-minute stretch where I don’t recall any lines being spoken—as he prefers to let the images do all the talking. One of the most beautifully truthful moments in the film is when Mui, seeing one of the fiancé’s high-heeled shoes on the floor, comes this close to trying it on. She starts to slip her foot in, but immediately draws it back. The implication is obvious: She’s a maid, an illiterate orphan, and though she dreams about it, she feels she could never—symbolically or literally—fill those shoes. When she discovers that Khuyen has been secretly drawing pictures of her, however, Miu indulges her fantasies—there’s a gorgeous close-up of her slowly applying lipstick— until, eventually, they become reality. This is handled not with gushing sentimentality, but with the same quiet joyfulness that Mui exudes throughout the entire film.

“Lush” is perhaps overused to describe the visual styles of certain Asian directors and films—Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love comes to mind—but The Scent of Green Papaya fully earns the adjective. What makes this even more impressive is that the film was shot completely on a soundstage in Boulogne, France. I can’t imagine recreating a period-accurate Vietnamese villa and its surrounding neighborhood was an easy task, but the art direction here is impeccable, so much so that you’ll quickly forget you’re looking at a set. The languid atmosphere is heightened by the slow, deliberate camera movements that Hung and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme employ, sweeping from one character to another, peering down over balconies, and occasionally tightening in to give us extreme macro shots of ants trapped in candle wax and frogs perched on rain- covered leaves, crickets in a bamboo cage and freshly sliced papaya innards. That Mui is obsessed with this miniature dominion is indicative of her character’s awareness of her place in life—she can’t make it out into the world beyond her servant’s quarters, but she has an expansive realm of the senses to explore, right under her nose. It’s fitting—and cathartic—that the film ends on a slow pan upward, above the face of a serenely smiling Buddha and into the sky.

The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Kino-Lorber brings The Scent of Green Papaya to Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's simply beautiful. To start, the print is immaculate—I didn't spot a single speck, scratch, or piece of debris—and the image looks entirely natural, with no signs of adverse noise reduction or edge enhancement. Since shooting on a soundstage allowed director Tran Anh Hung and cinematographer Benoît Delhomme total control of lighting, they were presumably able to use "slower" film stock, resulting in an extremely fine grain structure. This also lends the image an impressive degree of clarity, which Kino has been careful to preserve here. The individual threads of mosquito netting are easily visible and actors' faces yield discernable textures. Vegetables stir-fried in a pan look palpable enough to eat and macro close-ups allow us make out the hangnails on a finger about to squash an ant into hot wax. The picture looks greats in screenshots, but it's even better in motion. Color is also strong but realistic, with a palette appropriately defined by its vivid greens. Contrast could perhaps be improved somewhat with deeper blacks—they never seem truly inky—but this is a minor issue. Kino's transfer definitely does justice to this beautiful film.

The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There are elements of the film that practically call out for a full 5.1 surround sound treatment—a rainstorm, chirping birds, Khuyen's piano playing —but the Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track that Kino-Lorber has provided here suits the film well. If I have one complaint—and it's a relatively small one—it's that the mix seems dynamically shifted somewhat toward the high end, leaving certain effects and instrumentation sounding a little brash. You'll notice this in the bamboo flute that plays at the start of the film, the hissing sizzle of vegetables frying in a pan, and occasionally in the piercing violins of Tôn-Thât Tiêt's phenomenal score. There were a few instances when I felt like I needed to tamp down the volume a bit, but this never reached the level of distraction. For the most part, the music sounds wonderful, and if you've never heard this score before—you're in for a treat. The film really wouldn't be the same without it. Dialogue is clean and rides high in the mix, and the disc includes optional English subtitles in easy-to-read white lettering.

The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes Featurette (1080i, 12:43): This is really just an assemblage of behind the scenes footage—with no narration or interviews—but it does give us an inside look at how the film's expansive sets were created.
• Theatrical Trailer (1080i, 00:58)
• Still (1080p): A user directed gallery with 12 stills.

The Scent of Green Papaya Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Scent of Green Papaya is a complete sensory experience, from its lush visuals and soundtrack of birdsong and strings, to the almost palpable, smellable sensation that you're preparing papaya along with Mui, cracking open the fruit and revealing the mass of tiny spherical seeds inside. The film's quiet beauty is affecting, and Kino-Lorber has done a fine job bringing it to Blu-ray with a striking, near-faultless video transfer. I'm hoping the studio can give the same treatment to the following films in Tran Anh Hung's "Vietnam trilogy," and perhaps pick up rights for the director's most recent film, Haruki Murakami adaptation Norwegian Wood, which still doesn't have a U.S. distributor. Highly recommended!