The Scent of Green Papaya is a 1993 film from Vietnam directed by Tran Anh Hung.
The film opens in Saigon in 1951. Mui is a 10-year-old girl who has come into service with a rich merchant family. They are wealthy, but they have problems. The grandmother never leaves the upstairs bedroom, where she mourns her long-dead husband. The mother mourns her daughter Ti, who was a small child when she died several years ago. The father has a habit of taking the whole family bankroll and going on sprees that last for weeks. Eventually he goes on another spree, and tragedy ensues.
Cut forward ten years. Mui has left her first employers and entered into service with Khuyen, a musician/composer, a friend of her first family whom Mui has had a crush on for years. Khuyen is engaged to a stylish young high-society woman, but he begins to develop feelings for Mui.
Despite the fact this film is set in Saigon during the Vietnam War, the war is not relevant to the story except for some background detail, like when characters talk of a curfew, or fighter jets can be heard flying overhead.
Tropes:
- Bathtub Scene: Or the functional equivalent thereof, as Mui washes by repeatedly pouring a basin of water over herself in an erotically charged scene.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: There's a repeated motif of blade-of-grass cuts. Extreme closeups of tree sap dripping, frogs croaking, crickets chirping, ants skittering around. Many of these shots have Mui watching in joy and wonder.
- Food Porn: Multiple scenes have Mui preparing incredibly delicious, succulent-looking meals for her employers.
- Friend to All Living Things: Mui takes simple joy in watching ants crawling around, or frogs croaking, or crickets chirping. Eventually she gets a tiny little wicker cage and makes a cricket her pet.
- Glasses Pull: The husband comes back from his latest spree desperately ill. A doctor feels the husband's pulse and then takes his glasses off as he leaves the room with a look of concern. Soon the husband is dead.
- Like a Son to Me: The mother gets emotional when Mui is preparing to leave her household and move in with Khuyen. She says "Thanks to you I've felt like I had a daughter."
- Never Learned to Read: Mui the humble Vietnamese serving girl is illiterate. After she and Khuyen get married he teaches her to read.
- No Name Given: The mother, the father and the grandma from the family Mui works for are never given names, only the three sons of the family are named (Trung the eldest, Lam the middle one, and Tin the youngest one). Khuyen's girlfriend is also unnamed.
- Returning the Wedding Ring: Khuyen's girlfriend ends her room-wrecking tantrum, after the breakup, by leaving her engagement ring on a table and walking out.
- Romantic False Lead: Khuyen's fashionable girlfriend, who in the end is only a complication in the relationship between the composer and Mui.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Finally, finally, Khuyen enters Mui's room. She looks at him expectantly, the door closes, and the camera pans away.
- Shrine to the Fallen: The grandma keeps a candlelit shrine with pictures of her long-dead husband and her little granddaughter Ti. She never leaves the room.
- Silence Is Golden: It isn't a silent movie but dialogue is used rather sparingly. The long sequence at the end where Mui and Khuyen finally have sex, and the girlfriend smashes the hell out of his room in a fit of rage, takes place without a word of dialogue.
- Slice of Life: A quiet little drama about a gentle housemaid and the difference she makes in the lives of people around her.
- Tantrum Throwing: Khuyen's girlfriend reacts to their breakup by throwing quite the tantrum, in which she throws stuff around his living room and smashes his antique vase.
- Time-Shifted Actor: Two different actresses play Mui at 10 and 20.
- Time Skip: Ten years between Mui as a child in service to the merchant family, and Mui as a lovely grown woman in service to Khuyen.
- Visual Title Drop: Mui harvests unripe green papayas from a tree in the backyard, and chops them up for meals.
