The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) on Netflix
In 1950s Saigon, ten-year-old Mùi leaves her village to serve a family that was once wealthy. The wife, mourning a daughter she lost, treats her as one of her own.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/1011,180 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Mùi is ten years old when she leaves her village to serve a household in 1951 Saigon that was once wealthy and now has little money. The husband spends on himself and stays away, so the family lives on what the wife earns at her small textile shop. His widowed mother, an invalid, rarely comes down from her room and blames her daughter-in-law for not keeping her son happy. Three boys fill the house: the eldest seeks out his friend's company, the middle one reads and torments insects, and the youngest, who admires his father, is willful and disruptive. Years earlier, while the husband was away, the family lost a young daughter; the wife has been kind to Mùi since, treating her as one of her own children. Mùi is peaceful and intensely curious about the world.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Scent of Green Papaya was cast mostly with amateurs found through a lengthy casting process; apart from an old servant brought from Vietnam, all the actors were from France, and some had hardly any knowledge of Vietnamese or spoke different dialects.
