Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cinema: A delicate rapture from Vietnam...
...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...
...fairyland, the director creates images of exquisite rightness from a pristine, pastel palette, lifting the viewer's senses into a delicate rapture. The mood, the pacing, the search for beauty in a harsh society are ever so -- how shall we say? -- Vietnamese. Yet the film was not made in Vietnam. It could not have been: the country has hardly any film industry. So Tran, whose family immigrated to France in 1975, when he was 12, and who describes his film as a tribute to "the freshness and beauty of my mother's gestures," shot the film on a sound stage...
...then, in an act of both appropriation and reconciliation, the authorities of Tran's homeland adopted his movie: they made The Scent of Green Papaya the official Oscar entry from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Perhaps, for a nation emerging from centuries of war, the movie is the best kind of foreign aid -- the kind that comes, express mail, from an emigre's wise and tender heart...