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Article: `Papaya' Bears Fruit for Vietnam
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- March 6, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1994 Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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Who would have imagined that "The Scent of Green Papaya," the
French-financed Vietnamese movie that is Oscar-nominated as best
foreign language film this year, was influenced by American musicals?
Writer-director Tran Anh Hung's serenely beautiful romance
(opening Friday at the Fine Arts), already a hit at film festivals in
Cannes, New York and Toronto, has no singing and hardly any dancing.
Still, Tran sees his film as having the gestures and rhythms of an
American musical comedy.
In two parts, "Papaya" tells of little Mui, a Vietnamese peasant
girl placed by her poor family as a maid in a Saigon household in
1951. The first half conveys the intricacies of service and the
family's ...