Word: bien
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...Vietnamese writer- director. The Saigon on view in Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, recently nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, is serene, shimmering and stripped of melodrama. Set in two ominously tranquil periods -- 1951, a few years before the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu, and 1961, just before the U.S. buildup -- Green Papaya is seemingly apolitical. Yet in Tran's family drama one can see a society torn between East and West, passivity and passion, duty and will, ancient rites and modern desires...
Thanks to everyone who participated. And congratulations to David, who will get a gift certificate to Herrell's, as well as bags of Hershey's "Hugs" and--mais bien sur--"Kisses...
ATOP A GRASSY HILL OVERLOOKING THE PLAIN AT Dien Bien Phu, where almost 4,000 French soldiers died and nearly 11,000 were taken prisoner 39 years ago, President Francois Mitterrand listened as General Maurice Schmitt pointed out the landmarks: the mountains from which General Vo Nguyen Giap's troops bombarded the fields below, the airstrip, the hilltop positions that fell one by one until General Christian de Castries and his exhausted men finally surrendered on May 7, 1954, ushering in the end of France's colonial rule in Indochina. "I felt the need to pay my respects," said Mitterrand...
...wild-eyed than Oliver Stone's version in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The perspective in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover is as cloistered in its 1920s Saigon love nest as the French were from awareness of the impending revolution. Pierre Schoendoerffer's Dien Bien Phu (yet to open in the U.S.) meticulously restages the climactic French defeat as if it were all about artillery and not national destinies. The French are at times inhibited by good taste and historical scrupulousness...
...Krzysztof Bien, economics editor of the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita...