Mùi du du xanh / The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

Not sure if I can put my finger on why but Tran Nu Yen Khne washing her hair is probably one of most profoundly beautiful things ever captured in cinema…

It’s been a good ten years since I’ve last seen this and I think my lingering stance on this was that of a lot of film’s naysayers: insanely beautiful, but nothing happens. Even someone well-reared in arthouse classics is going to find the narrative (or lack thereof) in Tran Anh Hung’s debut to be trying. Admittedly, it takes a little time, but once one gets in tune with the film’s unique rhythms, it becomes difficult to tear oneself away from it. Sure, on a very literal level, this is 100 minutes of watching someone performs chores, but the tactical pleasure Tran takes in something as simple as a elderly person’s wrinkled hand makes all the superficially mundane things in this film feel utterly transcendent.

This has to go down as one of the all time greatest “artificial” cinematic experiences. Yet Tran isn’t exactly working in the same tradition as say, Powell & Pressburger, or for a more contemporary reference, Wes Anderson. Instead of embracing the artifice of his soundstage, Tran takes the opposite approach – breathing an organic ecosystem into his very controlled environment. The emphasis on intimate textures — everything from the water dripping off of plants to insects to scars are rendered with a nearly erotic level of intimacy. The effect is that the film, despite being made under controlled and “fake” circumstances, is an utmost celebration of all of life’s senses. Surely if any film could evoke “smell” this is it.

With a theatrical viewing of Floating Weeds fresh in my mind, it’s difficult for me to avoid the Ozu comparison. It’s a simple and reductive one for many modern “minimalist” Asian filmmakers, but I honestly think Tran here comes closest to fulfilling the old master’s aesthetic promises, while building something else that is entirely his own. Especially with having just seen a color Ozu film, it is striking to see how the two used their sound stages to perfect their compositions within. The elaborate vases here feel like a direct lineage to Ozu’s red teapot, in that they are art objects that help make up the total composition. They serve no narrative purpose (though I guess one can reach and read something into the family’s descent into genteel poverty through it) but instead are part of the complete mise-en-scene.

I don’t want this comparison to stifle the complexity and uniqueness of the film’s experience, though. It should be said that while there are shades of Ozu, Tran’s vision is something else all together. There’s criticisms on this website that the film is simply about nothing and most amusingly, to me at least, that the film never says anything meaningful about Mui’s labor. For me, it is never a requirement that art must radicalize us, and films don’t need to be political to be “important.” There is something equally important and profound to be discovered in this film, and it’s found in the details that Tran lingers on. These details become easier and easier for us to pass over in our modern world, but they are the things that draw us back to the fact we are indeed alive and living on planet Earth. Sometimes that’s more important than turning us all into leftists.

Les amants réguliers / Regular Lovers (2005)

“Just wait. Things may change.” “They won’t change.” There are many refrains in Les amants réguliers that threaten to synthesize the film’s 183 minutes of ideas into one line of dialogue. I wanted to resist buying into the impulse of picking one of these refrains as the film’s massive canvas alone suggests the enormous density of its pull. This is an enormous film. In its length, obviously, but more importantly in its approach. Garrel’s lack of concision could strike some a detriment, but the enormity of his texts give us space and time to be introduced to the specifically human phenomenons that his films depict. The film is structured by an initial idealism, then comes the disillusionment, and finally the disheartening takes from. We need time with these moments to punctuate their power as lived experiences. Despite being a film depicting 20 year olds, it perhaps take someone older to appreciate the processes that everyone, but specifically its titular lovers, François and Lilie, endure.

“I was given a molotov cocktail. All I had to do with throw it” This is what François tells us within the film’s first fifteen minutes. The ostensible protagonist is introduced to us an idealistic poet, a true romantic if there ever was one. His circumstances have offered him a swelling sense of purpose. It’s 1968 in Paris and revolutionary fervor is high. François doesn’t make a living, but he does make poetry and his well-off would-be comrade Antoine can house him in his opulent mansion. The initial enthusiasm of the uprising fizzles out, the revolutionary pre-tense of gathering gives way to parties at said mansion. During one such party, François meets and falls for Lilie. Lilie is a sculptor, which gives the couple a shared artistic vision, but her work is physical, tactile, and more importantly Lilie also has to work to make a living. The two fall in love, and although they’re both in their early twenties the enormity of their feelings for one another is authentic. We believe François when he says he loves Lilie. We believe Lilie when she says she loves François. As it tends to be in Philippe Garrel’s world, the relationship does not work out.

I very distinctly remember sitting in a bar with my friend the day after the 2016 election. At the end, it seemed like a epoch-level event and our presence in a Lower Manhattan protest earlier in the evening felt like us living up to the moment. It felt important, and more importantly justified and right. Protests proliferated during the fallout of the election. It seemed that every protest eventually concluded with someone admitting their exhaustion and suggesting the inevitable nightcap. Many of people I met at these protests became friends, and eventually the social impulse got to the point where the protest was deemed superfluous. The chants were skipped in lieu of the pints and socializing which was the thing everyone had genuinely craved in the first place. All this seems quaint and silly to me in 2023. That year’s election weighs little in my brain these days, as far more personally upsetting events have since taken place. But this recent rewatch of Regular Lovers resurrected those feelings. The initial revolutionary impulse (no matter how pathetic it seems now), the disillusionment that follows, and the burnout into unrestricted Bohemia. The power of Garrel’s film is that his nostalgia plays the part for one’s own. Perhaps we all have our own May 1968.

There is, of course, a collective cultural nostalgia for May 1968. Perhaps it was the first modern revolution, and perhaps it was the last to happen in a specific time and place, whereas all contemporary “uprising” are prone to postmodernism’s globally homogenized numb. Paris in May ’68 immediately conures up something romantic – even to those of us who weren’t even alive at the time. Garrel’s depiction of it, though, is tellingly a-romantic. The “revolutionary fervor” section that opens the film is not one where we are caught up in the middle of the unrest with our protagonist. Instead, we observe from a distance. These scenes resemble newsreel footage without the contextualizing force of a newscaster’s narration. The sequence goes on and on, uneventfully, which is enough to offer the more skeptical viewer the pretense of ridiculing Garrel’s vision of being bloated and overdrawn. There are those of us, though, who find this approach captivating. The “glacial” pace lends the romance that follows an incomparable sense of authenticity.

The romance of François and Lilie is the film’s most salient point. Their first meeting, the courting, the hours spent laying in bed post-coitus — these are the things that happen naturally in Garrel’s vast canvas. They don’t feel like the reason for the text’s existence in the first place, but a spontaneous sensation that crops within a near docudrama fashion. This further emphasizes the delicate balance of melancholy and naturalism that the film achieves. One feels something enormous in a film that is mostly a collection of “small” moments. Love is something that is just as beautiful as it is painful. There are million of films about being in love, but there are very few fictional romances that feel as authentic and lived-in as the one depicted in Regular Lovers.

Una vita difficile (1961)

In my recent review of The Conformist, I reflected on the way aging has altered my perception of “selling out.” There’s a bit more ambivalence in the present day for me, as some of my ideals (both political and otherwise) have fallen out of balance with the simple everyday matter of fact issue of continuing to exist in comfort. Living is difficult, and fittingly, it’s this same tension that is at the heart of Dino Risi’s aptly titled Una vita difficile. Risi’s touch, while sometimes understanding the aching nature of everyday life, is buoyant and cheerful, even as we follow our unlucky protagonist down the rabbit hole of disappointment after disappointment. Strangely, the film celebrates the downward trajectory our lives often take as being of the whole chaotic and beautiful whole of living. The tone is remarkably different from Bertolucci’s film.

At the tail end of the Second World War, partisan Silvio is on the run from Nazi forces occupying near Lake Como. He is taken in by innkeeper’s daughter, Elena, after she manages to rescue him from a near-death confrontation with a Nazi. The two spend three months together in a shack located near the inn, and during that time develop a relationship of pseudo matrimony. When Silvio’s partisan comrades arrive, he abandons Elena. Years pass, Silvio is now a reporter for a fledging Roman leftwing rag Il Lavoratore. A story brings him back to Lake Como where he reunites with Elena, who he takes back to Rome to start a life of marital bliss. Silvio’s lack of income throws a wrench into these plans.

The face of Risi’s picture is Silvio, a hard luck idealist embodied by Alberto Sordi. Sordi himself was synonymous with Commedia all’italiana, the genre in which Una vita difficile can be classified. My understanding of the genre is limited – I’d experienced Sordi once before in Alberto Lattuada’s Mafioso which made little to no impression on me at the time. I went into Risi’s film skeptical that I’d be in tune with his humor, expecting something more whimsical – but this about as sour and bitter as a comedy can be. Sordi manages to strike the perfect balance between tragic and pathetic, his Silvio is not a political martyr, but instead an idealistic schmuck whose vision of himself never quite lines up with actions. He is something of a scoundrel, but not an irredeemable one.

In a stroke of luck, my screening of Una vita difficile came a day after a viewing of Mauro Bolognini’s Senilità, released a year later. In that film, the protagonist falls hopeless in love with a woman until it consumes his personal life. Bolognini’s film is brilliantly shot but its protagonist, whose desperation bears some similarities to Silvio’s, is an insufferable bore. The film does not fail because its protagonist is unlikable but instead because it presents his vision of a world as a stifling one dictated only by a romantic interest. Silvio is similarly pathetic, but the anguish found in the film’s humor resonates because even as Silvio overcompensates for his ideals, he at least has those ideals to begin with. He is more than just a seduced target.

Silvio’s plight is accessible because it brilliantly showcases a fundamental flaw in many humans. He sees himself as a dedicated leftist. When he abandons Elena in the film’s first act, he explains it is because of a fighter, but it seems just as likely that he’s doing so for fear of commitment. When he is finally released from two years in prison, he berates his friend and coworker Franco for not standing by his side during the arrests. “The revolution was happening, and you were getting a cappuccino!” Meanwhile, an earlier sequence depicting the arrest shows Silvio himself abandoning his pregnant wife – a move of cowardice that is never referenced again. His vision of himself does not exactly line up with how he is depicted, but Silvio is also not overly self-conscious. As the film’s finale shows, despite his inconsistency, his decision-making is ultimately dictated by his pride.

Christmas in July (1940)

As I’ve aged into adulthood, one thing I’ve become more secure about is my insecurity. It sounds strange I know, but I’m now more aware that I’m not alone in this insecurity and instead that most of people’s waking lives are dominated by doubt, anxiety, and a level of self-consciousness. Even in returning to writing this blog, I’ve endured some stress at my personal expectations involving the responses of my peers. I, like anyone else, desire some form of validation. Dick Powell’s Jimmy MacDonald synthesizes this desire in Christmas in July when he says “I always thought I had good ideas. Now, I know I have good ideas.” This line comes after he falsely believes to have won the Maxford House Coffee slogan contest. The chaos that follows is one of the most concise distillations of the American Dream and all the agony it false promises can bring. Positioned by some as a minor effort, Christmas in July presents Preston Sturges at both his funniest and most moving.

Jimmy MacDonald sits on the roof of his apartment with his girlfriend and coworker Betty Casey. The two dream of a better life, lamenting the life of struggle that was paved out by their parents. Jimmy has a treatment for their economic ailment: he plans to win a slogan contest for Maxford House Coffee. He believes he has an unbeatable motto: “If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk.” Betty is less impressed with the plan, and not at all on board with the slogan. The next day at work, Jimmy is stunned to find a telegram declaring him the winner of the contest, but the telegram is a prank from his coworkers. The ruse is never admitted, though, and Jimmy and Betty enjoy an afternoon planning their now prosperous future.

 Christmas in July clocks in at a brisk 67 minutes. Maybe the optics of the short run time has led to limited critical evaluation, it seems many of my peers consider this to be a “minor Sturges.” Much of the critical rhetoric suggests that it is a light and fluffy affair. I can understand how one might feel this way, especially in comparison to the far more socially pointed Sullivan’s Travels (which only came out a year later!) but I think more of a punch is packed here than in the longer, more celebrated film. It’s the sort of film where if one blinks, they might miss something that launches pages worth of discourse.

When Jimmy first strides into work, he is greeted by a workspace that resembles a machine. Rows of desk all in perfect symmetry, with the humans occupying them acting as automatons laboring away. Sturges quotes and evokes King Vidor’s The Crowd and in a few quick seconds manages to convey the same weight of that film within a fraction of the time. Like Vidor, Sturges captures the anxiety of the working class – the feeling of being replaceable, a cog in the machine. Yet, Sturges film supports this sensation with humor. When Jimmy’s (false) win leads to a promotion at work, his boss at work astutely states, “Now that you’re a capitalist, I don’t know how you feel about working for a living.”

Jimmy’s working-class ennui is not pointed at, like the self-pitying liberalism of Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels, but instead something in which Sturges manages to draw in the margins. That’s film very explicit message of the importance of making people laugh seems to register better in this earlier effort, strictly on the basis of (and this is of course a personal opinion) it being immensely funnier. But most impressively to me, is the fact that Sturges pulls his best punches in the film’s rare but completely earned moments of tender emotion. Upon discovering that the telegram declaring the victory is a hoax, Jimmy and Betty return to their place of employment. A painter is putting the finishing touches on Jimmy’s new desk. The promise of a better future is slipping away and taunting them. Jimmy’s boss enters to re-congratulate him on his recent success, his promotion, his new office. Jimmy feels the need to come clean, but he does so obliquely. He suggests that his ideas he had earlier are still great, no matter if he won the contest or not. Winning the contest should be irrelevant. His boss replies that it does matter, “It’s what you might call commercial insurance as when a horse wins the Derby, you back him for the Preakness.” In the film’s most emotionally stirring moment, Jimmy confesses. “Well, I didn’t win.” To which his boss replies, “The Preakness?” Only Sturges could pack such a humorous uppercut in the middle of an emotional gut punch.

I fidanzati (1963)

I wouldn’t wish a long-distance relationship on my worst enemy. Mind you, I don’t really have a worst enemy, but my point stands. The phenomenon arrives from a compromise: the person you love is going somewhere else physically but neither of you can bear the idea of concluding the romance from such a massive inconvenience. I’m sure there are people who this has worked out for, but I cannot count myself as a participant in a successful long-distance relationship. From my personal experience, it produced a unique and unfamiliar type of anguish and longing, the sort that isn’t commonly depicted in art. It’s something that requires a delicate precision to depict, and it is something that Ermanno Olmi accomplishes in I fidanzati.

Lovers Liliana and Giovanni enter a small dancehall. The action has already begun, but the two pick out a table on the outskirts of the dance floor and they sit together in moody silence. Giovanni initiates a dance, but Liliana declines. This brutal date, we soon learn, is the couple’s last before Giovanni leaves Milan for Sicily. Adding to the bittersweetness, the locale was chosen as it was where the lovers first met each other. Giovanni’s job has relocated him with the promise of advancing his career. The move is temporary, 18 months we’re told, and is tantamount to a promotion but both parties in the relationship seem very unsure of themselves.  

I first saw I fidanzati 14 years ago. I was still a teenager. I had already been transfixed by Olmi’s previous film, Il Posto. To me, Il Posto was especially remarkable for how it true to life it felt. I understood the realism Olmi accomplished had lineage in the works of Rosselini and De Sica, but it felt like something completely different to me. He was not advancing a rhetoric of social condemnation but simply observing. The anxiety of that film’s young protagonist, Domenico, felt real to me because it resembled the way I faced a world that was beginning to feel more and more intimidating and exciting. As it was, I was impressed by I fidanzati but it was Il Posto that moved me.

The beautiful thing about cinema is that it is an art form and as such, one’s response to it can fluctuate. Our existence is always in flux, and our thoughts evolve. In this instance, it is more importantly that life events factor in. A budding teenage cinephile in suburban Ohio (uhh, that’s me, or was, rather) can maybe feel some of the longing expressed in I fidazanti but he certainly didn’t understand or connect with it on a deeper level. A 31-year-old man in Brooklyn (that’s also me) meanwhile has been shaped by the world through life experiences that have evolved and hurt him. The longing Olmi communicates here in even more impressive because it replicates an aching I endured.

Time works differently in I fidanzati than it does in Il Posto. The earlier film, for all of its strengths (and there are many) is far more linear. It works considering the subject matter, as someone as young as Domenico probably experiences life in a linear fashion. That is, when you’re younger, you are anticipating the future and are thus less dogged by your past, haunted by failures, frustrated over would-be relations. In I fidanzati, we have Giovanni, who is older and has done more. While he is often in the present – which is depicted through his acclimation to a new environment (not unlike Domenico’s acclimation to office life in Il Posto) he is just as often in the past, reminiscing of tender moments he shared with Liliana. The result is a full dimensional portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a new reality.

Olmi’s compositions are magnificent, of course, which helps to establish the anguish of his lovers. There seems to be a wonder in several of the set-pieces in Sicily, in particular. It’s almost as though he’s a documentarian linking a series of short pieces into one cohesive story, rather than structuring a film around a concise narrative. In one such scenes, Giovanni wanders into a church. He sits in the back, away from service and the clutch of children attending. He, like Olmi’s camera, is an observer rather than an active participant. Then, suddenly, a dog wonders in and causes chaos. The humor in Olmi’s world feels almost accidental, further fueling the quiet style of observation with which he shapes his films.

It’s in the final fifteen minutes that Olmi really ramps the film’s elliptical nature into hyperdrive. We jump back into the initial courting of Liliana and Giovanni. Knowing what we know from the previous hour, there is something unmistakably poignant in these little moments we now share with the couple. The two of them frolicking in a swimming hole, stroking each other face’s wordlessly in the grass, and even arguing. These are the moments that populate a relationship, and they must be replaced with something else when the two live in different cities. In this reverie, even the ugly moments become something to pine for as at least then you could talk to the person face to face. “We each kept our thoughts to ourselves” says Liliana as the film cuts back to the couple wordlessly facing each other, a composition from the film’s opening sequence. Time away brings thoughts, thoughts bring things you want to say but sometimes the distance is too great an impediment.