Sweet Dreams From Vietnam

By RICHARD CORLISS

In most moviegoers' minds, Vietnam is Oliver Stone territory -- the metaphorical battleground on which he has played out his burly war games of the conflicted American spirit. French filmmakers have also taken bittersweet & tours of Vietnam; in movies like The Lover and Indochine, Saigon has the poignant glamour of a beautiful woman's photo in an old man's memory book.

Finally, the task of remembering Vietnam has fallen to a Vietnamese writer- director. The Saigon on view in Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, recently nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, is serene, shimmering and stripped of melodrama. Set in two ominously tranquil periods -- 1951, a few years before the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu, and 1961, just before the U.S. buildup -- Green Papaya is seemingly apolitical. Yet in Tran's family drama one can see a society torn between East and West, passivity and passion, duty and will, ancient rites and modern desires.

Mui (Lu Man San) is 10 when, after leaving her family and her village, she arrives in Saigon to be the servant girl in a middle-class home. Here the mother still mourns the death of her daughter, who would have been Mui's age. The father luxuriates in a torpid guilt. Upstairs Grandma intones prayers for the family dead. Downstairs the couple's three boys make mischief. The youngest taunts Mui with merciless glee; he is just about the only sign of wayward life in this house-and-garden mausoleum.

Mui is a welcome sign of nature. She is radiant in her servitude; her toil gives her joy because it allows her to see in closeup how the world grows. She is enthralled to slice open a papaya, or watch an ant carry its backpack of crumbs. And with the same fascination, but etched in loss for her own child, the mother watches Mui. At night, as a breeze whispers through the sheer canopy on Mui's bed, the girl says the word mother in her sleep. The mother of the house, eavesdropping on this intimacy, dries her own tears on the canopy.

Ten years pass. Mui (now played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe), a beautiful young woman, is sold to a handsome pianist (Vuong Hoa Hoi). Cinderella finds her Prince Charming, and an aristocrat is ennobled when he falls in love with a pretty peasant. Every fable deserves a happy ending.

In this haunted fairyland, the director creates images of exquisite rightness from a pristine, pastel palette, lifting the viewer's senses into a delicate rapture. The mood, the pacing, the search for beauty in a harsh society are ever so -- how shall we say? -- Vietnamese. Yet the film was not made in Vietnam. It could not have been: the country has hardly any film industry. So Tran, whose family immigrated to France in 1975, when he was 12, and who describes his film as a tribute to "the freshness and beauty of my mother's gestures," shot the film on a sound stage outside Paris. Meticulously, lovingly, he re-created a world that ceased to exist before he was born.

And then, in an act of both appropriation and reconciliation, the authorities of Tran's homeland adopted his movie: they made The Scent of Green Papaya the official Oscar entry from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Perhaps, for a nation emerging from centuries of war, the movie is the best kind of foreign aid -- the kind that comes, express mail, from an emigre's wise and tender heart.