Fabmacca
30-Sep-05, 02:15pm
It seems that my last review didn't go down too well with the masses.......I'm surprised that everyone doesn't think exactly like me ;) Below is a review of a film that isn't a remake. Enjoy!
The Scent of Green Papaya (1993). Written and Directed by Anh Hung Tran.
I definitely think any prospective film-maker should be made to watch this film. George Lucas should be made to watch it twice. I can't think of any movie I've seen that has managed to do so much with so little, and that's actually a compliment.
The amount of emotion and nuance this movie manages to convey mostly without words entirely, or at most with short sentences, is stunning. And for such a simple subject it is remarkably engrossing - the life of a servant girl in a medium-wealth family. And nothing massive happens. There's not one thing you could put into a trailer to say "and then the totally unexpected happens". Because when something does happen it is entirely natural. Even when it's surprising, it's real and it's plausible. Even if in the scheme of things, it's totally minor.
It's a great example of how real life has its ups and downs : I mean this girl's life is more boring than mine (and that alone requires great imagination to conceive), and yet the ups and downs of her life are, to her, no less than having to emergency-land a plane or perform a tracheotomy with a biro. And it is testimony to the power and skill of the Writer/Director that our knowledge and understanding and empathy with the main character allow us to feel even those minor slights with the same amount of sensitivity of the main character.
It's quite an amazing film. I'm not one hundred percent certain as to the effectiveness of taking the story forward ten years about two-thirds of the way in and continuing the story from that point on. Although it could scarcely reach the conclusions it would want with the 9 (10? 11?) year old protagonist it begins with, it was this jump that caused me problems.
That is to say, I lost track of what the hell happened and then it ended and I was confused.
It was the film-maker's fault. All right, it was that and the fact that it was getting close to 1am and I'd come back from work at about 10pm, tired and hungry and munching on junk food and cola in an attempt to stave off growing fatigue...... but mostly it was the jump, coupled by the lack of dialogue that doesn't give much exposition directly or indirectly, coupled with adding 10 years to young kids and replacing them with new actors that confused me a little, coupled with, I might add, a couple of visual cues (music and frogs, both of which were present in the original house) that misdirected me. Basically, I thought she never left her original employer and instead continued to work for the grown-up children. I was wrong.
That's not in fact the case, because if it were then the end makes very little sense. As I found out when the artistically stylized letters reading "Fin" came on and I suddenly went "wait... what?" and had to skip backwards through the movie and figure out where I'd gone wrong.
Hey, don't mock me, I'm a very simple person when it all comes down to it. I make no apologies.
But I like this movie, I think it's very effective and the acting (especially of the young kids) is superb in a way that makes me want to grab the actors who played kids in The Phantom Menace and The Mummy Returns and slap them around the heads a bit more.
And a little kid kills an ant! Again, I'm so used to knowing that in Hollywood movies, you can't so much as shout at a cockroach without having an animal psychologist there to counsel it afterwards. Here? Thumb hovers. Squish. Quite shocking. (Human decapitations, on the other hand, depending on the context, I'm pretty much immune to by now.)
I give it 7.5 out of 10.
The Scent of Green Papaya (1993). Written and Directed by Anh Hung Tran.
I definitely think any prospective film-maker should be made to watch this film. George Lucas should be made to watch it twice. I can't think of any movie I've seen that has managed to do so much with so little, and that's actually a compliment.
The amount of emotion and nuance this movie manages to convey mostly without words entirely, or at most with short sentences, is stunning. And for such a simple subject it is remarkably engrossing - the life of a servant girl in a medium-wealth family. And nothing massive happens. There's not one thing you could put into a trailer to say "and then the totally unexpected happens". Because when something does happen it is entirely natural. Even when it's surprising, it's real and it's plausible. Even if in the scheme of things, it's totally minor.
It's a great example of how real life has its ups and downs : I mean this girl's life is more boring than mine (and that alone requires great imagination to conceive), and yet the ups and downs of her life are, to her, no less than having to emergency-land a plane or perform a tracheotomy with a biro. And it is testimony to the power and skill of the Writer/Director that our knowledge and understanding and empathy with the main character allow us to feel even those minor slights with the same amount of sensitivity of the main character.
It's quite an amazing film. I'm not one hundred percent certain as to the effectiveness of taking the story forward ten years about two-thirds of the way in and continuing the story from that point on. Although it could scarcely reach the conclusions it would want with the 9 (10? 11?) year old protagonist it begins with, it was this jump that caused me problems.
That is to say, I lost track of what the hell happened and then it ended and I was confused.
It was the film-maker's fault. All right, it was that and the fact that it was getting close to 1am and I'd come back from work at about 10pm, tired and hungry and munching on junk food and cola in an attempt to stave off growing fatigue...... but mostly it was the jump, coupled by the lack of dialogue that doesn't give much exposition directly or indirectly, coupled with adding 10 years to young kids and replacing them with new actors that confused me a little, coupled with, I might add, a couple of visual cues (music and frogs, both of which were present in the original house) that misdirected me. Basically, I thought she never left her original employer and instead continued to work for the grown-up children. I was wrong.
That's not in fact the case, because if it were then the end makes very little sense. As I found out when the artistically stylized letters reading "Fin" came on and I suddenly went "wait... what?" and had to skip backwards through the movie and figure out where I'd gone wrong.
Hey, don't mock me, I'm a very simple person when it all comes down to it. I make no apologies.
But I like this movie, I think it's very effective and the acting (especially of the young kids) is superb in a way that makes me want to grab the actors who played kids in The Phantom Menace and The Mummy Returns and slap them around the heads a bit more.
And a little kid kills an ant! Again, I'm so used to knowing that in Hollywood movies, you can't so much as shout at a cockroach without having an animal psychologist there to counsel it afterwards. Here? Thumb hovers. Squish. Quite shocking. (Human decapitations, on the other hand, depending on the context, I'm pretty much immune to by now.)
I give it 7.5 out of 10.