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Film Description
An exquisitely filmed rags-to-riches love story about a servant girl growing up in 1950s Saigon. One of the quietest and loveliest melodramas you will see. Very beautiful.
This is film that is delightfully shameless in its desire to please with its rags-to-riches storyline of poor young servant girl makes good, and in its deliberate sens... more >
This is film that is delightfully shameless in its desire to please with its rags-to-riches storyline of poor young servant girl makes good, and in its deliberate sensuality, which takes the time to follow milky sap dripping from a cut papaya stem, or watches Mui putting on lipstick or bathing, or running her finger through unripe papaya seeds inside a split fruit.
Throughout, the camera glides and tracks, placing people in a frame and when satisfied they are comfortable, quietly moving off to see what is happening elsewhere. The cinematography cares about the texture of things and finds pleasure in a wicker basket, a breeze on muslin, sweat on skin, light catching a ceramic glaze, light falling on a face. Scenes are often presented through screens and curtains, framed through doorways and through leaves – the servant’s view of events.
Nominally set in Saigon in 1951, apart from a curfew the outside world doesn’t intrude at all. This is a world of courtyards and kitchens and gracefully-appointed rooms. The accompanying music is lovely too with flutes and keening strings melding with the sounds of crickets and birds. Mui is enchanting, if a little moony.
The bright green leaves of the courtyard that appear in so many scenes are the film’s promise to Mui that all will come good. She is wholly allied with the natural world, taking time to watch geckoes on a leaf, an ant carrying away a crumb. So we are in no doubt with whom our sympathies should lie, one of the young boys in the family later drips candle wax on the ants.
There is nothing at all like character development in the film, which has pure melodrama at its heart (the husband walks out with the money when the savings box is full, the jilted fiancee runs out into a rainstorm), but it is one of the quietest and loveliest melodramas you could wish to see. At the end of the film we might have learned nothing more than patience is a virtue and little boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, but quite honestly it doesn’t matter a bit.
One of the first sentences we hear Mui learning to read is ‘the ripe papaya has a pale yellow colour’. It is of course the colour of Mui's dress at the end, the promise of all those green leaves having been kept.
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