Two Beautiful Films

G'day.

The two films I am writing about are by Tran Anh Hung, and they are The Scent of Green Papaya, and The Vertical Ray of the Sun.  There is  a third in the set called Cyclo, about a person who runs a taxi-bicycle.  The two that I've seen are bittersweet, very true to life family scenes. I have the feeling that Cyclo is a darker theme, but will tell more about it when I've seen it.

In The Scent of Green Papaya, a little girl goes from her village to become a servant in a large prosperous family in Hanoi.  When I looked up Hanoi, I was shocked to see that it's indeed in North Vietnam and so foreign to our American imaginings.  The customs, household, and family are so cultured and beautiful that they are set apart from our US standards by all measures.  The large family is unhappy because they had the tragedy of losing a daughter years before, from illness. The father thinks it was all his fault because he is a man who takes the family money periodically and goes away from the house to spend it all. His wife is devoted and loving, and has three boys, an almost grown teenager, a moody pre-teen, and a little demon four or five year old.  These are all portrayed with beautiful accuracy as to their emotional reactions to what's going on with their parents.  There is an old grandma, too, traumatized by the loss of her young husband years ago and her granddaughter who would have been the age of the new maid Liu.
      We follow along with Liu as she learns from an older servant the ways of the well-off household.  It is hard to believe the sophistication amidst simplicity of their beautiful lives.  I was fascinated by the cooking lessons, of course.  I was enchanted by the beauty and order of a large household that covered the grounds of a large compound indoors and out.  But I read in Wikipedia that Hanoi has existed on the  Red River for a thousand years...that swamps our little three hundred year old country by far.  And as my hairdresser used to tell me, they were occupied by the Chinese "one thousand years...the French, three hundred years...America--(grimacing)--forty five years...!"
     Anyway,   the beauty and order of the household, its furnishings and objects, its gardens and water features (as they are now called in landscape articles), is simply astounding.  Every inch is thought about, ordered, cared for;even the many wild little creatures, ants and lizards and frogs, seem to have a role in making the whole a beautiful place to live in.
     The next film, The Vertical Ray of the Sun, is about three beautiful daughters and their brother and their husbands and lovers...very modern, in its topics...with lovely children and, again, beautiful backdrops of home, garden, and sometimes dramatic coast scenery.  How easy it is to identify with these people, simple in some ways, deeply complicated in others...and how they deal with the cards life deals them. 
     Of course, even though these lives are portrayed as they were lived in the nineteen fifties, all would be different now.  Everyone would have a cell phone device in their hands, and the children would be rude, and TV's would be blaring.  So these stories would seem a fairyland to someone born after 1960, say...but I can remember all the way back to 1929 and I can tell you that it was not fairyland here in the US or over there in unknown Vietnam.  Things were different. People were the same, but things were very different. YAZZYBEL