L'odeur de la papaye verte (1993)100 min | XviD 720x432 | 1749 kb/s | 192 kb/s AC3 | 25 fps | 1.36 GB + 3% recovery record
Vietnamese | Subtitles: English, French and Spanish .srt | Genre: Drama Saigon in the 1950s: Mui, a 10-year-old peasant girl, has come to serve a rich family. A discreet, almost invisible spy, she learns their secrets - the husband runs the household to ruin. Ten years later, she moves on to a more modern home where the young master chooses her over his Westernized fiancée. He teaches her to read, but doesn't really remove her from the kitchen. Tran Anh Hung, a Vietnamese raised in Paris, has made a hymn to subservience riddled with symbols. The papaya of the title is picked by servants: when ripe it is a fruit, when green, a vegetable. The name Mui means aroma and Yen-Khé Tran Nu who plays the ripe Mui is certainly sweet. Shot in a studio outside Paris, the enticing settings (a latticed house, a dream kitchen), the subdued tone and insinuating soundtrack make an aesthetic whole that coincides with the current exotica fascination, particularly in France where nostalgia for the colonial past dies hard.