Word: saigon
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...Perhaps not surprisingly in a century devoted to minimalism in every area of the arts -- and lately to downsizing in every area of commerce -- producers and performers are increasingly taking that definition literally. Broadway box office is dominated by maximalist musicals known to cynics as the helicopter show (Miss Saigon), the chandelier show (The Phantom of the Opera), the barricades show (Les Miserables) and the zoo story (Cats). But occasionally on Broadway, and incessantly off it, this is also a heyday of the one-person show...
...most moviegoers' minds, Vietnam is Oliver Stone territory -- the metaphorical battleground on which he has played out his burly war games of the conflicted American spirit. French filmmakers have also taken bittersweet & tours of Vietnam; in movies like The Lover and Indochine, Saigon has the poignant glamour of a beautiful woman's photo in an old man's memory book...
Finally, the task of remembering Vietnam has fallen to a 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...
...when, after leaving her family and her village, she arrives in Saigon to be the servant girl in a middle-class home. Here the mother still mourns the death of her daughter, who would have been Mui's age. The father luxuriates in a torpid guilt. Upstairs Grandma intones prayers for the family dead. Downstairs the couple's three boys make mischief. The youngest taunts Mui with merciless glee; he is just about the only sign of wayward life in this house-and-garden mausoleum...
...enthusiasts believe that assets like oil, timber and an industrious, literate population are the makings of another Asian miracle. Harder heads are skeptical, noting that the nation consolidated by Ho Chi Minh's heirs after the 1975 fall of Saigon is poverty-stricken and still at least partly under the thumb of ancient Marxists. Per capita income remains at $200 a year, one of the poorest in the world. Says Julian Reid, a director of Jardine Fleming Securities in Hong Kong: "In the medium to long term, Vietnam is extremely exciting. The short term is full of frustrations...