Hung: Mui du du xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya) (1994)

Sometimes a director’s vision emerges as if miraculously, fully-formed from their very first frame, and that’s very much the case with The Scent of Green Papaya, which launched Tran Anh Hung to immediate international acclaim. Narratively, it’s quite slight – less a coming-of-age story than a coming-of-age atmosphere, it constellates around a young servant girl, Mui, who comes to work for a suburban Saigon family in the 1940s, before jumping forward to her relationship with the family in the 1960s. Like Hung’s subsequent films, it’s not really driven by characters so much as proprioceptive potentials, as both Mui and the camera continually test where their contours end and where those of their new environment begin. Most of the film takes place at the very outermost limits of Mui’s perceptual awareness, her spatial and architectural horizons, which determine Hung’s insatiable tracking-shots as tangibly as if they were actual physical co-ordinates. And, at this cusp of consciousness, this odd, frictive zone between camera and world, other forms of consciousness start to emerge – not just the consciousness of Hung’s camera, but of the entire natural universe, as if the only thing that could form a horizon to Mui’s sentience were the existence of another, radically different type of sentience, whether of adults, the middle class, or the endless animals (usually reptiles and insects) that she encounters throughout the film. Films this dependent on spatial cognition often work best in closed environments, so it feels right that Hung virtually never leaves the house, a decision that also adds to the period authenticity – filmed in its entirety on a sound stage in France, the mise-en-scene doesn’t just capture how French Indochina might have looked in the 40s and 60s, it captures how it might have looked in 40s and 60s film, poised somewhere between The Letter and Tokyo Story. And this stately mid-century Saigon feels especially indebted to Ozu’s mid-century Osaka – at times, it almost plays as Ozu with tracking-shots – so it’s not hard to see why Hung was chosen to direct Norwegian Wood some twenty years later either. Swathed in blue-green crepuscularity, it’s a coming-of-age vision that still hasn’t come of age, just because Mui never does – her consciousness never closes in on itself, never ceases to be an interface for other minds at their most mysterious, or mysteries we might not even recognise as other minds.