"A story of beauty, passion and forbidden fruit!" v "Two Thumbs Up the Highly Sensual!"
Soooo... neither of these films are really what the mid-1990's faintly-racist-marketing tin they were packaged in - designed no doubt to lure a mix of the arthouse patron and the perv - says they are. Beyond this similarity they have related period-set narratives, with one concerning the arrival of a village girl into a city family that is falling apart, and the other of a city girl moving into the farmlands of a new country and a forging a new ‘family’. Here's what I think of them:
The Scent of Green Papaya (Anh Hung Tran, 1993)
One of the most potent examples of arthouse ponce ever perpetrated, the high reputation of this film (Camera D'Or winner at Cannes, Nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar, a Cesar for best debut) is baffling to me. I can only assume that the entire world of film was beset by an affliction for bird chirps and a love for scenes of Asian women washing their neck and face.
Filmed entirely on a sound-stage in France, the film is set in 1950's Saigon, with the turbulent events of that period of Vietnam's history forming a subtly alluded-to background. In the first-half, we follow a young country girl named Mui, who enters a middle-class home to be their servant. The family is dysfunctional in lots of deliberately ambiguous ways that are drawn out interminably amid scenes of the young girl's naive introduction to life, the family's quirks and dark secrets, and their gradual adoption/adoration of her. To be fair, these scenes were quite pleasant, if a little lifeless, and I liked the young actress' performance, the scenes of kids being kids, the compositions. So far, so arthouse minimalism. Very slow, very slight in the plotting, cutesy, some nice visuals of sap dripping, papayas being peeled.... quite enjoyable when its on the girl, boring as hell when its about the family. But absolutely nothing special at all when compared to what other filmmakers are able to achieve with this same style and with far less pretension.
Hello part two of the film! 10 years later, we have Mui aged 20. The family patriarch disposed of at the end of act one, Mui is left serving Khuyen, a family friend who she fancied the pants off of when she was a kid. Will he ever notice how great she is and what a shit his current Westernized girlfriend is? Because the audience did within 1minute of the segment… The part of Mui is played in this segment by an actress who completely derails the film with her wooden performance. Oh my god is she awful. She does however have a nice technique when washing her face, or something, so we get a lot of that. A lot. And we get a lot of very, very, very, very, drawn out scenes of the building of the 'forbidden love' that the poster promised us that are so excruciatingly poorly handled, so obvious in the plotting and so disturbing in its sexual politics as to completely ruin whatever goodwill the first-half had created. Just like the first half, there’s more to it than the surface, some good cultural digs and historical references and social resonances… whatever – the surface is so poor, I would never revisit this film to find out what they were.
I really hated the second half of this film so much. If you want a fairly pleasant, romanticized view of childhood and/or 1950’s Vietnam, then you could enjoy the first half and just turn it off before part two, I guess.
Picture Bride (Kayo Hatta, 1995)
Picture Bride is an unassuming, crowd-pleasing movie. Your mum might like it. It’s very Hallmark channel meets Merchant Ivory, and plays sort of like a less melodramatic/sexually fraught Wild Is The Wind. It concerns the real story of the thousands of women who left Japan for Hawaii between 1901 and 1923 to marry Japanese men who had already made the trip. The introduction and increased accessibility of photography revolutionized the practice.
We follow Riyo, a young “city girl” with a “dark secret” that, just like in
Wake me if I smell like green papaya, really isn’t that big of a thing when it’s revealed either. That bothered me somewhat, but not as much as in the other film.
Anyhoo, Riyo sees a photo of her husband to be, and after having her photo taken, she’s off to Hawaii! Except when she gets there she finds the sugar cane field worker she’s lumped with is not like the handsome geezer in the photo. So, their relationship is from the start based on betrayal and unease. The rest of the film follows a fairly predictable path as Riyo first rejects her husband and the tough lifestyle but grows to appreciate both, along the way forming an important friendship with Kana, one of the other picture brides already on the island.
But unlike its competitor here, it’s not pretentious at all, and just tells its old-fashioned story with efficiency. The pleasure of the film is again in the incidental details (Riyo’s childlike biting of her husband’s hand under the covers on their wedding night, male and female workers in the sugar fields singing their sexual politics to each other), but here they all feel germane to the story, rather than just displaying style for the sake of it. For example, though the film is set in Hawaii, it has no desire to picture-postcard the setting, and it’s over an hour before we even see a beach or the ‘sexy waterfall’ of the poster.
It also has a body-washing scene! This one has a quiet, cheeky nod to Psycho, but doesn’t fixate on endless neck-soaping, thank god. A very old Toshiro Mifune also shows up for a bit as well, which was fun.
To its detriment, it has a horrendously misjudged dream sequence before the final acts, and an unnecessarily cheesy final voiceover. Again, the sexual politics of the ending didn’t please me greatly, but it felt natural to the story Hatta wanted to tell, and at the end of her long journey, Riyo was shown to be more than just a cipher for male desire. Good for her, and good for
Picture Bride.