Beyond being the only Vietnamese film to ever be nominated at the Oscars, The Scent of Green Papaya should be seen and kept in mind for a lot of different reasons. The act of summarizing such a film, whose plot is set in a neighborhood that is mostly inhabited by small-scale merchants, somewhere at the midpoint of the 20th century, would mean to impose a sort of linearity onto the film which I think might be ill-suited for such an endeavour. So I will simply invite you into its empire of cardboard and silk, into which a camera has been introduced.

It’s difficult to imagine a film that is more Proustian than Tran Anh Hung’s offering, his 1993 debut film, The Scent of Green Papaya: a retrospective game, sustained at the highest temperatures of endearment, which journeys through all the smells, the textures, the mirages and dark corners of childhood, while simultaneously trying to recover a little something of the unique emotion of “first times”. What is Proust doing in an occupied Indochina, wandering the crowded corridors of a Saigon villa, where little events and happenings flow on by, in a rhythm that runs the same each and every day? Well, it’s the fact that both Proust and (of course, within the limits of proportionality) Tran make a goal of rediscovering the special, inimitable scent of memory. It matters little that the tiny little place where this scent snuggles up has the shape of a sponge cake or a green papaya which protagonist Mui (Man San Lu), a girl working as a maid for a middle-class family, is peeling before dinner, cutting it up into thin slices with a gesture of the knife that is almost hallucinogenic in nature. What matters, if one wants to prove themselves worthy of tasting said memory, is to discover the precise form which will lead you to discover it. The Scent of Green Papaya would be just another saccharine film about childhood if it didn’t look beyond its plot, in search of a moral to pass onto the audience. Once set into shape, the phantasy that is conjured by this tender film is at times so intoxicating that one could swear that it follows the tone of a white-bearded character’s voice, who is at times present for the unfolding events, sifting through them under our very eyes, his flourishes at just the precise measure.

Lying somewhere in between Terrence Davies and Robert Bresson, Tran’s film reveals a fragment of the world that is self-sufficient, where every single gesture, even the smallest one can imagine, is closely checked upon its entrance in the frame. The goal here is to submerge us into a time and space that is a figment colored in by subjective factors, which asks to be accepted and understood on its terms, and makes sure that the audience knows this from the very get-go. The thing is that, just as Davies, Tran is part of the same ilk of filmmakers that rely on the sealed-off terrain that is the studio set – the film’s principal shooting took place in a suburb of Paris – to be able to fully unleash the energies of its mise-en-scene and to do so in a way that is as controlled as possible. It’s not an easy thing to invent a system, a form that is reprised again and again, up until it becomes a pattern, without stumbling into the pitfalls of formalism, which is always within reach. In such cases, I can imagine two possibilities: one either creates a foolish pattern, which goes all the way with all of its most mannerist tendencies, breaking into the terrain of grand auteurship precisely through excess, as in the case of Davies. The other option is to understand that such a horizon is out of reach and forbidden from the get-go, and so to make the decision to animate your film from within, applying not-at-all simple tricks in your mise-en-scene, which then function as an implosion. What one obtains by following this route is a world that is book-ended by streets on which one may move with incredible freedom. Or with a stuffed animal whose eyes reflect a ray from the strangest of lights.

One should take a look at how Tran’s camera handles all the obstacles in its path: it circles them, slips in between, or simply accepts their presence, knowing it has nothing to lose in doing so. The result is a beautiful choreography, thanks to which everything that we see is seemingly enticed or confused by the quaint architecture of this Asian home, which beckons us to get lost within. Tran understands that a setting can turn into a character that is equal to others at no loss, all the more so a decisive contribution to the magnificent play of gazes that weaves itself between the characters who are either looking or avoiding each other, incapable of finding the right words. For all the micro-gestures that the film strings along like pearls on a necklace, the dialogue is poor, almost always absent: and that is part of this filmmaker’s real talent, the fact that in the film’s second sequence, set ten years later after the first, he offers us a splendid negotiation between shame and restlessness, the same one that Mui, now a charming teenager, touts in the company of the young pianist who owns the bourgeois house that she is taking care of. I was just speaking about micro-gestures, a term which must be understood in its most generous sense: not just because Tran’s propensity for following such gestures is in the pursuit of the poetry of day-to-day gestures, such as the act of preparing a meal for lunch, but also because he lowers his camera to the same level as the other creatures that also inhabit this home, along with the humans: from lizards to frogs. In the film’s reduced, intentionally anti-melodramatic economy, a shot shows us ants struggling in a hot puddle of sticky wax, a scene that suddenly gathers all of the momenta of Dantean theatre.

The same Proust used to write: “Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the countries in which we happen to be.” Words which, in the case of Tran, who has been living in exile in Paris since 1975, when he was only 13 years old, gain a startling meaning. The Scent of Green Papaya is more than just an intimate chronicle about a handful of people that are confronted with life’s problems and its tender rays of light, dotted at times by the sounds of a war that is being waged outside its walls. It is, first and foremost, an attempt to return, in an oblique fashion, to a province long left behind, which can only be reached through affective means. In the incremental disordering of senses that the film involves us into – thus simultaneously tracing the trajectory of a form in free fall, that loses its discipline and clarity somewhere along the way – we can infer not just the discovery of pleasures which trump rationality at a young age, but also the fear of losing control over memories. It is in this drunkenness of memory that one can find both a euphoria that cannot be prolonged, as well as an unavoidable hangover. The Scent of Green Papaya leads us down that golden thread of the past, fulfilling its mission at the point in which things threaten to lose their candor, deprived of the alibi provided by this child’s gaze, into which one would like to submerge themselves time and time again.

The Scent of Green Papaya is available on MUBI.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.