Liberate de la Carga Mental

Un road-cómic book de 84 páginas, con guión y dibujos de Mariano Casas, que narra la huída de una pareja de amantes, de la que desconocemos casi todo, aunque lo iremos intuyendo poco a poco a través de sus conversaciones. Han intentado dejar atrás su pasado de la forma más abrupta posible y viajan por una enorme llanura, en una vieja furgoneta, con una enigmática carga de la que quieren desprenderse. Pero la carga más pesada es la de su propia culpa, de la que no se desharán fácilmente.

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.