Snooze-fest. And I was duped! I was looking for a Vietnamese film with English subtitles. Not many to be found. Came across this which was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film representing Vietnam. It previously won the Camera d'Or at Canne. Well, turns out it was filmed on a sound stage in France. Seriously?!?! I wanted Hanoi, I got Paris. In any case, it's a well-filmed art-house movie, beautiful in its aesthetics (and thinking about it retrospect, a very close-up shot film to hide the fact it's all a studio set!) Unfortunately the movie suffers terribly in more ways than it's good. I'm not sure I've ever seen a slower moving film practically about nothing. An ordinary servant girl goes to live with a family at age 10. At age 20 she's working for someone else. That's about it. Antagonist? Conflict? Tension of any kind??? Not until about the last 10 minutes. Yawn. Sort of a Cinderella ending so perhaps a bit of a chick flick. Very well acted but yawn. Agonizingly slow. (Yawn!) High rating on IMDb but for my zero pirate dollars spent, it was (at the time) my 10th Worst Movie watched in 2013.3.4 / 10 stars--Zoooma, a Kat Pirate Screener

If your taste runs to action blockbusters, this film is not for you. The Scent of Green Papaya is the sort of film that repays patient observation, and lends itself to repeated viewings. I'm not an "intellectual"--I will admit I had to take a couple of runs at this film before I understood what I was seeing. The first time, I turned it off 20 min. into it, saying, "Nothing's happening here!" That's true, if you're used to Western films that are driven by action and dialog. Like many Asian films, TSOGP is instead driven by inter-action between characters and observation. The camera functions as an "eye" to show us life from the character's point of view. After seeing the entire film, I became aware that it had become a part of my mental furnishings; I realised I was spending quite a lot of time thinking about it in the following days. I'm told by those who live with me that the highest compliment I can give a film are the words, "I need to see it again." And I do--I need to buy a copy and see it several more times.Ten year old Miu is sent from her home village to Saigon to work as a servant in a cloth merchant's household. She is fascinated by their beautiful home and its furnishings, the papaya tree in the courtyard, and how very different their lifestyle is to what she has known. The youngest son of the family sees her arrival as a golden opportunity--at last someone is lower on the family totem-pole than himself, and he tries to bully Miu in various ways. However, his attempts fall flat as he never gets much of a reaction; in her innocence, Miu accepts events as they come, never trying to assign blame or "tell" on him. If a jar gets broken, she accepts it is her fault; if a pail of dirty water gets upended or "someone" pees all over a clean floor, she cleans it up without a word. Her employer's wife soon sees her as a surrogate daughter, someone to fill the void of her own daughter's death and her own loveless marriage to a spendthrift husband who abandons the family for weeks at a time and comes home empty handed.Ten years later, Miu is sent to work for a family friend, a young man she has long admired. His relationship with a spoiled girl of his own class flickers out as he becomes more aware of Miu's quiet presence in his life. All of the "action" of the film is crammed into the last 30 min, as we see the results of his growing awareness and its transforming effect. The film is stunning to look at, as usual in much of Asian cinema. If I had one complaint, it was the soundtrack; not the traditional Vietnamese music played by father and son at the beginning of the story, but the tortuous "contemporary" Western music in the second half, including a dreadful rendition of Debussy's Claire de Lune--as if an alley cat were trying to play the violin on its own cat-guts. The caterwauling added nothing to the film, and only served as an irritating distraction. This is what caused me to lower my rating of this otherwise fine film.

The tip of film who seduced without a sure cause.A sweet powerful flavor of memories, time's ash, images of other secret age, spell of a subtle shadow.Poem of silence, slice of amazing dream, form of cult for ambiguous god.Wall of a delicate world of small gesture and impressive light.Signs like stairs, warm remember and love like reality's skin.Trip of soul on personal space before the Fall.Is it a masterpiece? No! Is it a beautiful movie? No! It is only prefiguration of self desire, escape in Golden Age.

"Cyclo", the film Tran Ahn Hung made following this, his debut, is one of my all-time favorite films. This film isn't bad at all, but nowhere close to that masterpiece. No question Tran Ahn Hung is a very good filmmaker, but this wasn't quite compelling enough. Pretty to look at, but not a whole lot else. Ultimately I think the film is just slightly too subdued for it's own good, and threatens to disappear into it's own poetic reverie. Also, at times the film was distractingly stagey, not surprising considering that it was shot entirely on a set. Particularly problematic were the outdoor scenes, although there weren't very many of them.