The Scent of Green Papaya is about a young girl Mui who goes to work as a servant for a wealthy Vietnamese family. As we see in the first couple of scenes she does the daily chores for the family which include cooking dinner, scrubbing the floors and doing laundry.
One thing that is also very noticeable is the lack of conversation throughout the movie. If there is conversation it is mainly between this women. This symbolizes the simplicity of Vietnamese people. They don't need a lot to make them happy. Another symbol i noticed was the power men have over the women, gender roles. We see this in one of the first scenes when the women are doing all the chores around the house and the men are sitting playing their instruments. We also see this when the master runs away with the families money. He does this three times and each time he comes home, the mistress is so happy to see him and doesn't say a word to him about it.
The third symbol I saw was when the large colony of ants is burned by the candle wax. This symbolizes the huge loss the Vietnamese faced during the war.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Scent of Green Papaya is about the life of a Vietnamese girl, Mui. It takes place in the early 1950’s but later in the movie jumps to the 1960’s. This is a movie not only about the Vietnamese culture and their people, but it is also a love story. At the beginning of the movie, Mui leaves her village to go work for a wealthy Vietnamese family as their servant. She has left behind everything that is comfortable to her, her mother, her sister and her village. While working for this family, Mui finds out that the master has left his family and taken all their money and that his wife is left alone to support the family, with little to no money. This portrays how hard the Vietnamese women worked, while the men did nothing. When the husband decides to come home, he is accepted back into the family. This also reveals the power that men have over women in Vietnam. They control everything in the household. The women, the children, and who does what. We also see at the beginning of the movie, the women are doing all the chores while the men are just playing the instruments. This shows how prominent gender roles are in the Vietnamese culture. Women do everything while men sit and watch.
ReplyDeleteThe second symbol I noticed in this movie was when the master’s son pours hot candle wax over the ants. I saw this as a representation of the murder of all the Vietnamese people during the war. There is little emotion on this young boys face. This represents how laid back the Americans were during the war.
At the very end of the movie, Mui falls in love with her master Khuyen. He was engaged to be married to another woman but ended up calling it off. As we’ve learned, a prearranged marriage is a custom in most Asian cultures. Khuyen calls is off when he realizes he loves Mui. In the very last line Mui speaks of a cherry tree. This represents how much she has grown as a person throughout this movie. A cherry tree, buds, blossoms, bears fruit and then dies and no matter what it goes through it’s still a cherry tree. Mui has gone from being a poor girl from a village, to being a servant to a wealthy family, to falling in love with her master, yet through it all she is still Mui.
The last symbol I noticed was that there was little to no noise throughout the movie. The only real noise is birds chirping, bugs and other sounds of nature. This symbolizes how simple the Vietnamese culture is. There is no “city bustle” or cars horns or people screaming. Everyone is kept to themselves and it doesnt take much to make them happy.