Though its title may sound like some middle-to-lowbrow parody of an Asian art film (no less than Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice or Mizoguchi's The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums), and its air of quietude may in many ways live up to that same brow's dimmest and direst imaginings, this is the real deal. The story it tells -- of a servant girl in a bourgeois home in the Saigon of 1951, and then in a different home after a ten-year time jump -- is simplicity itself. Far more to the point is its overall narrative method, which might be described as one of selective intimacy balanced off against selective reticence. The intimacy, wherever it asserts itself, is little short of microscopic: a slow drip of milky sap on a leaf, an ant carrying off a crumb four times his size, the skinning, shaving, and slicing-open of the titular fruit, and so forth. But it is also impressionistic -- discriminatory, discretionary. And it creates an odd sense of emphasis whereby events of major importance are passed over quickly and obliquely while ones of seemingly no importance are dawdled over and examined in minute detail. This of course is deliberate and calculated, and it shifts the focus of the narrative from the conventionally "dramatic" occurrence to the daily one, from individual events to their grander context, from the fleeting moment to the continuous timeline, from one life in specific to life in general. The first feature film of (at the time) twenty-nine-year-old Tran Anh Hung, an expatriate Vietnamese residing in France, fulfills the stiffest requirements of a piece of imaginative fiction. It plunges us deeply into an enclosed world, a particular and particularized place and time and set of characters. (If the place had to be re-created on Parisian studio sets rather than on location, so much the better. So much the more imaginative. So much the more fictitious.) And it brings this place thoroughly alive, from ants to plants to human occupants to the house itself: a richly textured environment of railings and balusters, of window frames and symmetrical painted grilles, of diaphanous curtains and netting, of flora and fauna -- never piled on too much at once, but appreciatively sorted out in cleanly focussed and firmly clamped-down images. It might sound paradoxical to say that by plunging us so deeply into a particular life, the movie opens out onto life in general. But there it is. If we see deep enough, we attain distance. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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