*** THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA
Until fairly recently, films from the Chinese- and Vietnamese-speaking world have had next to no distribution here; so it’s worth noting that three such movies have been nominated for the foreign-language Oscar: Farewell My Concubine from Hong Kong, The Wedding Banquet from Taiwan, and The Scent of Green Papaya from Vietnam. The first two of these have already opened in Chicago, and the third–in some ways my favorite in the bunch–is starting a run this week at the Fine Arts. What overlapping interests–economic, cultural, artistic, ideological–are being served by this sudden upsurge in attention?
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To what extent is mainstream status something legitimately recognized by distributors and academies (including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), and to what extent is it something created by promotion, including press coverage? If films from China, Taiwan, and Vietnam are no longer deemed marginal to public interest, films from Africa continue to be regarded that way. This is not an aesthetic judgment arrived at by critics, but an economic judgment made by distributors–though one finds it reflected in the discourse of most mainstream critics as if it represented their own aesthetic judgment: China’s hot, Africa’s not. It’s worth adding that Farewell My Concubine and The Wedding Banquet are both concerned in part with homosexuality, a topical subject in the U.S. Does this mean that if masterful African filmmakers like Souleymane Cisse, Djibril Diop Mambety, and Ousmane Sembene–none of whose work is commercially available here even on video–made films that were comparably topical, they might become Oscar-ready as well?
The only indications of war that we get in the film are the occasional sirens and overhead planes, and if memory serves these are heard mainly in the first section, set in 1951. Significantly, in an interview given to the French newspaper Liberation, Tran cited as his most formative early film experience Robert Bresson’s masterpiece A Man Escaped (1956), an account of a real-life escape from a Lyon prison during World War II in which the world outside the prison is represented exclusively by offscreen sounds.
Tran, who was born in Vietnam in 1962–a year after the film’s second section takes place–and moved with his family to Paris in 1975, seems to be working out an allegory about personal origins here, but how deeply this has any bearing on Westernization is less than clear. On one hand, it’s refreshing to see a third-world feature characterized more by studio mise en scene than by pseudodocumentary techniques–and closer in its formal pleasures to Max Ophuls or Ernst Lubitsch (in its principles of camera movement and camera placement) than to Satyajit Ray or Yasujiro Ozu. On the other hand, the beautifully realized studio shooting serves in some respects to increase the touristic exoticism of a movie about Vietnam–to place it under glass as a delectable consumer object. (I’m told that when Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque recently showed the movie as part of a fund-raising benefit, they offered a Vietnamese meal with the same dishes displayed in the movie as part of the package. Did that include, I wonder, a too-salty sweet-and-sour pork? In the movie it was made too salty because of a shortage of rice, thereby provoking a small domestic crisis.)
