Review of The Scent of Green Papaya / Mùi đu đủ xanh, directed by Tran Anh Hung

At the beginning of October 2023 I decided to make a spontaneous decision and head to Malaysia.

My cousin lives there with her husband, as he got a research gig at a university in Kuala Lumpur, and I was so excited to head back to Asia for the first time in five years. But when I arrived in Malaysia, I was delighted to see the options on Netflix and MUBI.

When I first logged onto MUBI when I was in town, I made a little list of everything that wasn’t available on the American version of the platform.

The first movie I watched when I was there was The Scent of Green Papaya, which captivated me by the description alone.

I looked up the trailer after reading that description, which is why I was really interested in seeing this film specifically. There’s a lot of fantastic images and conversations packed into this movie, that’s for sure.

That said, here is my review of the film!

Mùi, a servant girl, finds her way in the world after the decline of her wealthy employers.

Our protagonist in this movie is Mùi, who lives in Vietnam. She’s enlisted by a formerly wealthy family to become their servant, but as she sees when she enters their home, they’re slowly but surely sinking into poverty.

The only thing keeping them afloat is the wife has a small business, but her husband doesn’t do anything, cheats on her, and spends all of their money.

His mother, the wife’s mother-in-law, also just sits in her room and blames the wife for everything that happened to the family.

They also have three sons, but they, too, don’t really do anything about their situation. The eldest son just goes off with his friend.

The middle son is depicted as torturing insects, while the youngest son looks up to his father and just wants to be like them. Mùi navigates the household, just getting her job done.

The wife takes a liking to Mùi, as she lost a daughter once. She sees Mùi as someone who is a bit of a replacement for the daughter.

However, things are about to change for all of them. The husband leaves for another woman, stealing all of the wife’s money and jewelry.

He stays away as the family goes hungry, then returns. However, upon coming back, he falls to the ground, and the wife is forced to sell a valuable vase to pay for his treatment. A doctor is brought in to treat him, but he dies anyways, leaving the family in shock.

Ten years pass. Two of the sons have left, and the family no longer has the glory they once held. Both the husband and grandmother have passed at this point, and the wife just stays upstairs in a room like the grandmother once did. However, no money is left to keep Mùi. The wife, devastated by this, gives her a dress and gold jewelry.

The eldest son helps Mùi get a job as a servant with his rich friend. The friend is a concert pianist with a fiancee, but he seems to have no interest in her.

This makes the girl more angry, and when she spots Mùi with him, she explodes. She slaps Mùi, destroys some objects, and dumps her ring on the table.

In the mean time, he teaches Mùi how to read and write. The film ends with Mùi pregnant with his child, smiling at him as she reads poetry aloud.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a fascinating movie to watch, especially as it pertains to Vietnam. Mùi’s story tracks a larger story about wealth and its decline in the Vietnamese context, and although her story ends out alright in the end, it doesn’t for other people (like the fiancee, for example).

There are a lot of lush images scattered throughout this as well, making it such a delightful experience to watch.

I’d realized halfway through watching this that I haven’t really seen a ton of Vietnamese movies before, and now I want to engage more with this kind of national cinema.

All in all, I’m really happy that I watched this! It definitely was a treat to see it on MUBI after coming abroad.

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