ASIA: VIETNAM: HEAVEN AND EARTH, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA

The performances do make this work. Li has the difficult task of holding this all together, and while she's not as experienced as the other actors, she's very convincing taking Hayslip through her journey, up to her triumphant return to Vietnam at the end. Ngor and Chen are both good as her parents, and Jones is good in the Vietnam scenes, showing an unexpected tenderness. Overall, HEAVEN AND EARTH doesn't match Stone's earlier Vietnam films, but it's moving nonetheless.

SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA was the first Vietnam film, I believe, to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It's also the story of a young girl, but it's much more tranquil than HEAVEN AND EARTH. However, like HEAVEN AND EARTH, it's somewhat disjointed.

Hung's film, set in the late 1940's, centers on Mui (Lu Man San), a ten year old orphan girl who's taken on as the servant of a merchant family. The father (Tran Ngoc Trung) is barely visible (he drinks and cheats on his wife (Truong Thi Loc)), and the children often play pranks on her. But she quietly observes everything around her, and this doesn't go unnoticed by the wife or the head servant (Nguyen Angh Hoa), who grow to trust her.

In this half, while what's going on both in front of Mui and where she can't see can be somewhat vague, at least as far as the family's concerned (it takes us a while to learn why they're truly unhappy), Hung does a great job of showing the peace Mui has with the world around her. It certainly helps that San is an natural, effortless at playing inner calm, which is hard for actors three times her age to show. The second half of the movie, however, shows Mui as a grown-up (played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe) becoming a servant to a pianist (Vuong Hoa Hoi) who was friendly to the family she served. She's always had a crush on him, and they fall in love. This is a more conventional story than the first half, but the real problem is Yen-Khe merely gives a Xerox performance of San's, and it's disconcerting to watch. This is sad, because otherwise, THE SCENT OF GREEN PAPAYA achieves real beauty at times.

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