Tran Anh Hung Orphan Tales

Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales
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Michèle Bacholle
With two short films and three feature films, Tran Anh Hung is now an estab-
lished director.1 Focusing on his first two feature films—The Scent of Green
Papaya and Cyclo—this essay will demonstrate that while they may at first appear
self-sufficient and rather unrelated, these films in fact complement and complete
one another. If, like all of Tran’s films, both revisit the homeland he left in
1975—Vietnam—they also work through the same fundamental problematic:
Vietnam’s (cultural) fatherlessness. Represented by the figure of the orphan, this
problematic is embodied by the films’ respective leads: Mùi in The Scent of Green
Papaya and the cyclo-driver, referred to as “Cyclo,” in the film of that name. In
The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran presents, by way of Mùi’s development from the
young peasant who left her village to work as a servant into an accomplished
young woman, a feminine solution to the problem of fatherlessness. In Cyclo he
presents, in Cyclo’s Ho Chi Minh City experiences, a masculine one. Reading
these films as two parts of one journey, this essay will show that these characters’
journeys trace what Tran Anh Hung invites us to read as Vietnam’s journey
from servitude to self-assertion and liberation, and the challenges of modern life,
its poverty, and its crime. Together, then, this essay will show that The Scent of
Green Papaya and Cyclo provide what we might construe as a comprehensive
vision of the ways in which Vietnam and its people might resolve their problem
of fatherlessness and move into a brighter future. I have chosen to elucidate this
journey by following Tran’s symbolic use of color. I will show that Tran uses
the symbol of a papaya’s maturation from green (xanh in Vietnamese) to yellow
in The Scent of Green Papaya to illustrate Mùi’s development, while in Cyclo, he
has Cyclo move from an early association with yellow to an association with
blue (also xanh in Vietnamese) to underscore not only that character’s redemp-
tion, but Vietnam’s as well.
10.1057/9780230107410 - Of Vietnam, Edited by Jane Bradley Winston and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier
TRAN ANH HUNG’S ORPHAN TALES 171
The Scent of Green Papaya:

A Mythical Past and a Nation to Be Born
Dedicated to Tran’s mother, The Scent of Green Papaya opens a window onto the
world of women in 1951 and 1961 Saigon. More specifically, it focuses on
the domestic world of a well-off family whose mother owns a fabric shop and
is the breadwinner and whose father revels in idleness before disappearing with

their savings. This film extols the beauty and gentleness of feminine and mater-
nal gestures. Shot in studio with few characters and fewer extras, it is character-
ized by slow movements, few words, and many sounds (birds singing, light
music), all of which contribute to its general sense of isolation, calm, and peace-
fulness. If Vietnam was in turmoil both in 1951, when it was still a French
colony, and 1961, when the United States was supporting the Diem regime and
sending in more troops, The Scent of Green Papaya is set in a past undisturbed
by—as if sheltered from—historical events. Tran said that he wanted to give his
film an impression of freshness (Cross 35). He achieved this effect with an abun-
dance of rain, water, and of the plants that are present in almost every shot, but
especially through Mùi’s radiant smiles and innocent gestures, and the use of two
colors: green and yellow.2
In the space between this film’s two parts—1951 and 1961—an evolution
occurs. Tran uses color to figure that evolution symbolically: green dominates
the 1951 scenes; yellow those of 1961. Green is omnipresent in the first half of
the film: in the plants, food, objects, and Mùi’s clothes. As the film opens, Mùi
wears green clothes; by its end, she is clothed in yellow. Where the younger
Mùi’s green clothing is linked to immaturity and lack of self-confidence—we
see her arriving in town for the first time and hesitantly looking for her way in
the dark, the older Mùi’s yellow clothes are aligned with her maturity and self-
confidence. Indeed, at the film’s end, she is seated, wears a bright yellow tunic,
looks directly at the camera lens, and reads a poem with her hand resting calmly
on her pregnant belly. Tran reinforces this symbolism with a parallel use of color
around a photograph on the family altar of the masters’ deceased little daugh-
ter, Tó, whose place in the family Mùi comes very close to occupying in the
end. In the first half of the film (Mùi in 1951), Tó’s photograph is surrounded
by green flowers on the left and yellow fruit on the right; in the second half
(Mùi in 1961), only the yellow fruit remain.3 In the decade between these two
images of Tó’s photograph on the altar, Mùi leaves the family to work for an
unmarried young pianist and composer, Khuyên, who has started teaching her
to read. Moreover, the association of both Mùi and the photograph with the
colors green and then yellow is further reinforced on the level of decor: when
Mùi leaves the family, she leaves a predominantly green room, after being tem-
porarily hidden to the spectator’s eyes by a yellow shutter. At Khuyên’s house,
the space is clearly delimited. In that house, in fact, each character has his/her
own space: Mùi has the kitchen and her own room, which Khuyên never enters;
he has the living room, which she enters only as a shadowlike servant to clean
or bring his meals. Between their respective spaces, there stretches a yellow cor-
ridor. One crucial day, as Mùi applies to her own lips red lipstick she found in
172 Michèle Bacholle
Khuyên’s bedroom, the camera moves from her lips to Khuyên, who stands
watching her. As she flees to her own part of the house, Khuyên follows her for
the first time through the yellow corridor. A pivotal scene in the movie, this is
a decisive moment in their lives: both now know how the other feels.
From its title on, The Scent of Green Papaya links Mùi to the papaya. The orig-
inal title, Mùi Du Dú Xanh, offers a play on the word Mùi; the Vietnamese word
for scent also names the heroine. Although in his interview with Alice Cross,

Tran said that there is nothing really deep about the connection (Cross 35), it is
tempting to compare this title “Mùi of the Green Papaya” with the title of some
of Chrétien de Troyes’s novels, such as, for instance, Yvain: the Knight of the Lion,
and Lancelot: the Knight of the Cart. On this reading, the papaya is Mùi’s attrib-
ute as the lion is Yvain’s and the cart Lancelot’s. Mùi and the papaya are further
linked in a kitchen scene: as she prepares the papaya for eating, she opens it,
strokes the seeds inside, tenderly takes one between her thumb and forefinger,
and then sets it softly down on a bed of greens. This film links the symbol of
the papaya seed to Mùi’s intellectual development. In the first text she reads, she
finds these words: “In my garden there’s a papaya tree. The papayas hang in
bunches. The ripe papayas have a pale, yellow color.” In the context of this film,
however, the image of a sole papaya seed softly laid down on what looks like a
nest suggests that her maturation and serenity are due not to her progress in
reading and writing alone, but also to an inner happiness resulting from the fact
that she is pregnant with Khuyên’s child. Moreover, the viewer is invited to read
Mùi’s and the papaya’s maturation as a figure for the maturation of the nation:
its pregnancy, as it were, with the nation’s future and next generations. Histori-
cally, Vietnam was a nation in gestation in 1951-1961, a nation as yet unborn
but with infinite possibilities. The Scent of Green Papaya’s final camera movement
appears to emphasize these possibilities as it sweeps up and away from Mùi’s
pregnant belly and onto a statue that seems to protect her. So doing, it appears
to gesture toward a promising, uplifting future not only for her, but for Vietnam
as well.
Cyclo: A Hyper-Realist Present and

a Nation Stepping into Adulthood
After he finished The Scent of Green Papaya, Tran said: “My goal was to impreg-
nate [the spectator] with a certain kind of rhythm. Now, however, I have the
feeling I need to shake people to the bones. I would like to make a film where
they go out physically fatigued” (Chua 8). The result is Cyclo, a film whose
violence recalls that of birth and whose pains echo those of growing up and
coming of age, and whose main character, the pedicab driver known only as
Cyclo, figures both Mùi’s son and the post-1975 generation in an independent
Vietnam.
Cyclo completes The Scent of Green Papaya by showing, through its main pro-
tagonist, how younger generations can diverge from an honest path and fall vic-
tim to the attraction of Western ways—drugs and easy money (dollars), which
too often go hand in hand with corruption and crime. In it, The Scent of Green
Papaya’s mythical, feminine Saigon gives way to hyper-realist, masculine Ho Chi
Minh City, its busy streets, Western neon signs, and business transactions in dol-
lars. Here again, the central character is orphaned: Cyclo’s mother died in child-
birth; his father was killed the previous year in a cyclo accident, leaving his son
the main provider for the remaining family members. His father’s death, his lack
of guidance, the difficulty he has making ends meet, and governmental agencies’
failure to provide ambitious young people like him money to start their own

businesses, combine to set Cyclo on a dangerous path. Eventually, however, he
rejects the life of crime, which Tran invites us to read as Western ways—or, in
the symbolism of this film, the ways of the adoptive father—and reconnects with
the Vietnamese cultural traditions (of his own deceased father). Thus the film
traces Cyclo’s journey, which begins with his gradual descent into the dark
underworld of crime and is followed by his orphic anabasis (ascent back to light).
As in The Scent of Green Papaya, the protagonist’s trajectory is figured symboli-
cally on the level of color: in this case, his ascent’s climax is figured as a bath of
blue paint.
Dedicated to Tran’s father (and to Serge G.), Cyclo is set in a masculine world
(cyclos and criminals) where women are most often mere commodities. It is set
in a world of daily survival in an impoverished, uncompromising, and violent
society where illegality and corruption prevail. Its violence is expressed by swift
camera movements, deafening street sounds, jerky, syncopated music, and chang-
ing, blinking lights. As Tran remarked, “In The Scent of Green Papaya the camera
touches lightly [effleure], in Cyclo it strikes [percute]” (Dinh 12).4 In the former,
Mùi improved her condition by learning to read and write; in the latter, the theft
of Cyclo’s pedicab leads him into increasingly serious criminal missions.5 His
elder sister gets entangled in a parallel, if unrelated, chain of dramatic events
(prostitution with fetishists, and rape).6 As Cyclo’s missions drag him deeper into
crime, he receives a wake-up call. It comes in the guise of another pedicab driver
who is run over by a truck and killed, as Cyclo’s father had been, and whose
bloody body lands on Cyclo. During a night following this traumatic scene,
Cyclo goes to sleep only to waken with a start, shouting “Father!” As he then
contemplates his own hands, he utters these words in voice-over:
You died a second time to save me. This morning I feel strangely calm as
if I am living in your body, in your silhouette, your walk, your gestures.
These bony fingers, this rough hand, is it yours or mine? I feel your mus-
cles flex in my arm. This skin, it’s yours, burnt, toughened, defying the
heat, the cold, the years. These veins you called them the path of life. Now
I understand.
Thus is Cyclo’s contact with his father, honesty, and traditions, re-established. In
the next scene, he looks at and crumples a ten-dollar bill, a gesture that signals
his determination to stop working for the city crimeworld’s boss lady. His
attempt is temporarily delayed, however, by the woman’s son, who has covered
himself in yellow paint.
Cyclo’s completion of The Scent of Green Papaya is symbolized by colors,7
which are used differently, however, in this film. A clear movement from yellow
to blue marks two simultaneous events: the death of the boss lady’s retarded son
and Cyclo’s rebirth. But from the first scene, the color blue bathes the entire
film. That scene figures a man behind Cyclo wearing a blue shirt, a man in a
blue surgeon mask, and a blue truck; after it, the crossroads where Cyclo’s father
died is said to be called Hang Xanh (“blue store”), other of his fellow cyclos are
seen eating from blue containers, the little sister’s tunic has blue flowers, Cyclo’s

bicycle is blue with blue armrests, Cyclo is forced to drink diluted bleach
through a blue funnel, the boss lady’s tunic and robe are blue, the shutters of
Cholon houses are blue, blue lights are in the nightclub, on the streets with neon
lights, and in the hideout. Moreover, because many scenes take place at dusk or
dawn, Cyclo’s T-shirt often takes on a blue hue. Blue marks Cyclo as heir to tra-
ditions and honesty, for despite the fact that he diverges from his path briefly, he
is soon called (back) by his father and experiences a revelation. In contrast, the
color yellow is aligned with the boss lady’s son, who combines, symbolically, his
own retardation and his mother’s corruption. Thus, Tran’s use of color shows
the retarded son and Cyclo embodying two alternatives for the Vietnamese
people and youth: one might give in to Western ways and risk one’s soul, or one
might renew contact with what we are invited to read as traditional Vietnamese
cultural ways. By saturating his film with blue, Tran makes it clear where he
stands.
Tran Anh Hung brings his protagonists together in one pivotal scene: the
“bath of blue paint.” While Cyclo is heavily intoxicated with drugs and alco-
hol, the character called the Poet, the boss lady’s right arm and the man who led
Cyclo’s sister to prostitution, gets drunk and sets his own apartment on fire. As
he does so, the boss lady’s son sits on the street. He is surrounded by people
preparing for Tet in the blue ambiance of neon lights and by children who, to
play a prank on him, place firecrackers on a small fire truck in front of him. The
small explosion startles the mentally handicapped boy, who lurches into the mid-
dle of the street, right into the path of the real fire truck rushing to the Poet’s
apartment. Simultaneously, the boss lady and the sister arrive on the scene of the
accident. The son is covered with blood, at which his mother wonders: “Why
do you love paint so much? Where did you find this color? Our family doesn’t
use it.” Cutting to the Poet’s apartment, the camera shows his clothes catching
fire and dollars flying up in the flames. Cutting then to the apartment across the
street, Cyclo opens a bucket of blue paint. As a blue light blinks, he smears the
paint on his face, spills it on the floor, and rolls over and over in it.8 As he then
puts a plastic bag over his face, the camera does a close-up of his mouth as he
stops breathing. Tearing the plastic away, however, he fires into the aquarium,
puts a goldfish in his mouth, and plays with it.
The next morning, one of the crimeworld figures, called simply the Knife,
wakes him up and says: “Mr. Lullaby should have rocked you, but someone up
there spared you.” Is that someone the boss lady who embraces Cyclo, still
smeared with blue paint, confusing him with her dead son and crying for
him?—“My little one. . . . He’s dead.” Or is it his deceased father? Or could it
be a divine power who intervened on that day of Tet? Significantly, this triple
scene (Cyclo-son-Poet) takes place on the night of Tet, when, by tradition, one
cleanses oneself, one’s conscience, and one’s life. Consistently, this night of Tet
figures the end of Cyclo’s misfortunes and those of his family, and the dawn of
a new and honest life. In this Tet scene, Tran figures Vietnam cleansing itself of
the corrupt Western influences, embodied by the burning dollar bills and the
Poet’s death. With that episode, he suggests that for Vietnam, the future lies in
the reconnection with the past and with traditional cultural and family values.

In this sense, it is also significant that the new year being celebrated in his film’s
Tet is identified as that of the Pig, for what counts for Pigs is tradition, family,
and honor. With the new year of the Pig, Cyclo sets off on a path where hon-
esty and family prevail.9
In The Scent of Green Papaya, the two colors—xanh and yellow—illustrate
Mùi’s maturation.10 In Cyclo, they represent the end of one cycle and the begin-
ning of a new one: the yellow-painted young man dies while the one doused in
blue—also xanh in Vietnamese—is brought (back) to life. The blue paint
episode marks the completion of Cyclo’s initiation and the redemption of his
soul—“someone up there spared you.” Now a grown man, he can return to his
life and occupation. As the film ends, the family that was for a short while dis-
sociated is reunited. Even the cat that had disappeared when the father died is
back: “Yesterday the cat came back. We thought he was dead. He’s even more
handsome than before. So handsome, nobody recognized him. I remember my
father right before he died.” The return of the cat, a figure associated with the
father, suggests that all the misfortunes that rained down on Cyclo and his fam-
ily were the result of his own failure to remember his father and to respect and
abide by his traditional values. His dream about his dead father set him on the
path to introspection, recovery and redemption. Not surprisingly, then, in the
film’s last sequence, the epilogue, the camera sweeps over buildings, a Western
hotel, tennis courts, and the streets, and then focuses on Cyclo transporting his
whole family in his bicycle rickshaw and moving off to the top right-hand cor-
ner of the screen, where they get lost in the crowd. This last shot sums up the
path that Cyclo’s life took: first to the left (sinistra, where bad things happen) and
down into the world of criminals, and then, by the end, up toward a brighter
future.11
Vietnam’s Journey from The Scent Of Green Papaya to Cyclo

Between The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, as between Mùi and Cyclo, about
thirty-four years have passed. In that time, Vietnam won another war, and the
two parts of the country were reunified. Now, as the misadventures and mishaps
of Cyclo and his sister12 suggest, Vietnam must deal with a Western-type
market-oriented economy that is plagued by crime and corruption. Through its
protagonist’s final liberation and re-birth, Tran Anh Hung’s second feature film
offers suggestions, if not a solution, for the ways Vietnam might work toward its
future: by remaining true to its traditions and by reconciling with them the
demands of progress and the new economy.13 The film’s title insists on this par-
ticularity: Cyclo-cycle. As Tran once said: “I want to present, through the cycles
of [Cyclo’s] life, the difficulty that people have living in Vietnam today” (Chua
8). The brighter new tomorrow toward which Tran Anh Hung points Vietnam
at the end of Cyclo is figured in the guise of rhizomatic networks.
As theorized by postmodernists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the rhi-
zome provides lines of flight via which one can escape the territorializing and
oppressive powers of capitalism. If the streets of Ho Chi Minh City function as
a rhizome that enables Cyclo to escape the police and eventually the criminal

dollar-ruled underworld, the film Cyclo itself constitutes a line of flight from the
closed space of The Scent of Green Papaya and pursues the liberation already ini-
tiated by Mùi. Cyclo, that is, is a rhizomorphic growth of The Scent of Green
Papaya. A postmodern film in a postcolonial city, Cyclo is characterized by a rhi-
zomorphic explosion that leads to a final openness. For its part, the Tet finale
stages three simultaneous scenes or, to use another Deleuze and Guattarian term,
plateaus.14 Moving seamlessly from one scene to the other, Cyclo eventually pur-
sues a unique line of flight, figured both by Cyclo and his family in his bicycle
rickshaw and by a child overlooking Ho Chi Minh City.
Within the film, numerous rhizomes are traced around scenes or objects that,
through cross-references, create semantic, rhizomatic networks. Cyclo, for
instance, transforms the Scent of Green Papaya scene in which Mùi opens a papaya
to look at what lays inside. It desacralizes it on two occasions: in one scene, the
entangled lines and round shapes of the betel palm flower are stained by the
Poet’s nosebleed;15 in the other, a foot fetishist cuts the sister’s black stocking
open and uncovers her toes. Mùi’s innocent gesture has become a gesture of
weird sex.16 Rhizomes also emerge from elements including photographs (suf-
fused with duty and honor, Tó’s photograph was placed on the ancestors’ altar,
whereas in Cyclo the Poet’s photograph at age 5 is abandoned among papaya
skins17 and eventually stolen by pick-pockets), basins, balconies, songs and
poems, animals, paint, blood,18 and finally the color blue. All of these elements
build lines of flight. Some of these lines intersect in a move toward liberation,
toward deterritorialization, which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, leads to
becoming-animal and eventually to becoming-imperceptible. Most importantly,
Cyclo’s own trajectory takes him through the process of becoming-animal. Tran
Anh Hung marks this trajectory explicitly: as we recall, he has Cyclo put the tail
of a small lizard in his mouth and leave it partly out as it continues to move.19
After shooting at the aquarium, he picks up a goldfish and puts it halfway in
his mouth.20 Finally, in the blue paint scene in which the goldfish is stuck in
the paint on his hair and everything is blurred into blue, Cyclo “becomes-
imperceptible” in a film dominated by shades of blue. Rather than an end, his
“becoming-imperceptible” marks a beginning and a rebirth. Coming amid the
Tet celebration, it reveals Cyclo to have been cleansed and “redeemed” on that
New Year.
Children embody the bright tomorrow toward which Cyclo points. In fact,
they appear throughout the film, thus creating another rhizome, another line of
flight. They are on the roof, in Cholon, in the countryside in the same posture
as the Poet and the sister, on the night of Tet around the boss lady’s son, in the
singing class, overlooking the city, and playing music in the final scene. Even
when the credits unfold, we still hear and see them playing. In the course of the
film, the children are transformed: they begin voiceless, eyes closed, in the coun-
try; by the end, they are assuming voice—indeed, singing—and the gaze of one
of them embraces the city. These are the children or grandchildren of Mùi, of
the Vietnam of the 1950s and 1960s; and these children are distilled and resumed
in the sole figure of Cyclo, whom we witness being initiated into adulthood at
the age of eighteen, the age of maturity. Through this figure, Cyclo depicts a

country that is, in some respects and despite a long history, still young, because
it is newly independent. Like Cyclo, Tran implies, it has now to fend for itself
and struggle with crime, corruption, poverty, and other political and social flails,
but, rich with its traditions (as Cyclo with his father), it is able to move forward
and step into adulthood.
Thus, if at first The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo seem to be highly con-
trasted films, a closer examination reveals their complementarity: home/streets,
inside/outside, isolation/crowdedness, feminine/masculine, peacefulness/vio-
lence, slowness/swiftness, good/evil. Contrary to appearances, these films have
more in common than they do contrasting elements, albeit on a deeper level.
Tran confided to journalist Tony Rayns: “I hope and think Cyclo will be differ-
ent from Green Papaya, but there will be a lot of cinematic continuities between
the two films” (Rayns 20). As it turns out, the continuities are more than just
cinematic, they are thematic as well. Both are tales of innocence and (quasi)
orphans. Both deal with the problematic of Vietnam’s and the Vietnamese peo-
ple’s fatherlessness, and both relate an initiation journey in which the orphaned
child tries to find its way. Each character sets out on a journey on his or her
own, then comes to a halt in a period of suspended time where initiation takes
place and finally departs with his or her family, a complete and responsible man
or woman.21 Movement thus occurs from an unknown, unveiled past to a pres-
ent where progress is achieved, toward a brighter, more elevated future. Vietnam
has also traced that movement, progressing from centuries of occupation (Chi-
nese, then French, Japanese, and American) to a struggling but transitory pres-
ent, toward a hopeful future.22 These films are not just about Mùi and Cyclo but
about Vietnam itself, and their messages are conveyed in color. Green is the
color of duckweeds, leaves, and water; yellow represents the earth. For the Viet-
namese, the union of yellow and green, earth and water, symbolizes the father-
land, or rather the “ancestors’ land” (tô quôc).23 If the green and yellow of
Western values (dollars and urine, or waste) have entered their world, like Cyclo,
the Vietnamese have to come to terms with them and integrate them without
losing sight of their own path. The upward camera movement, at the end of
both The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, denotes the “elevation” of Mùi and
Cyclo, their victory over earthly hardships and the uplifting of their souls. With
the victory of blue—a color associated with the sky, endless horizons and
possibilities—that upward movement shows Vietnam the way to a brighter
tomorrow.
Notes
1. His short films are The Married Woman of Nam Xuong in 1989 and The Stone of Waiting in 1991;
his feature-length films are The Scent of Green Papaya in 1993, Cyclo in 1995, and A la verticale de
l’été in 2000.
2. For an interpretation of colors in The Scent of Green Papaya, see my article “Camille et Mùi ou
Du Vietnam dans Indochine et L’Odeur de la papaye verte.”
3. The spectator is invited to compare, and even associate, Mùi and Tó through a scene in which
their faces appear successively.

4. Unless otherwise noted, all translations within text and notes are my own.
5. These crimes include spoiling tons of rice with water, setting a warehouse on fire, transporting
drugs hidden under pigs’ skins, and killing—a mission that he does not carry out.
6. The entanglement of their two descents is symbolized by the transition between his arson scene
and her foot fetishist scene. Back in the hideout after setting the warehouse on fire, Cyclo
plunges his face smeared with soil and larvae into the aquarium. The brim of the aquarium,
made of vertical sinuous lines (with the head of Cyclo on the left and the goldfish and plants on
the right), dissolves into the body of the sister standing in front of the foot fetishist.
7. Western influence also challenges traditional values via colors: green of dollars has replaced green
of plants, and yellow of urine and mental retardation (the boss lady’s son) has superseded yellow
of maturity (ripe papaya/Mùi).
8. In the original script, the son coated himself in blue, and Cyclo in yellow. In the film, the two
colors have been reversed.
9. Léopold Cadière notes that the word for house, nhà, seems to be the same as the Chinese gia, a
word the ideogram of which is made of the sign for roof over the sign for pig. House (family)
and pig are then closely related.
10. Blue is also present in this film, but to a much lesser extent: the shutters are blue in Khuyên’s
house and his fiancée wears a blue dress.
11. Tran does not necessarily see an optimistic closure to both his films: “Maybe the significance is,
now that she [Mùi] is pregnant, she is going to lose that freshness and become like the mother
we saw at the beginning of the film. Let’s just say that I left little signs around to indicate that a
pessimistic ending might be justified” (Cross 36). Such a statement is contradicted by the film
itself where Mùi’s freshness remains intact as she marvels at her baby kicking and where the cam-
era moves up to the statue. About Cyclo’s future, Tran said: “He resumes his job. He dodges in
and out of traffic. The path of his journey is far from clear” (Dinh). Here too, his pessimism can
be explained by the fact that making Cyclo made him grasp how the country he left at thirteen
has now become foreign to him. Cyclo’s final image, with a child embracing the horizon and
children playing music, definitely grants the film an optimistic ending—in spite of the tourist
hotel and tennis courts that are now part of the landscape. The final view of and vision for the
country do belong to its children.
12. The relationship between the sister and the Poet parallels that of Mùi and Khuyên. It is based
on (male) power. A crucial difference voids the parallelism, however: respect. Khuyên respects
Mùi and helps her improve her fate whereas the Poet just uses the sister. If Mùi was at first a
mere commodity, passed on from one master to the next, by the end she has asserted her indi-
viduality and she has a voice of her own. As long as she is under the Poet’s thumb, the sister
remains a commodity.
13. This conciliation of traditions and (post)modern demands, of Orient and Occident, is repre-
sented in Cyclo’s “bath of blue paint” scene. That (Western) moment of deterritorialization—
which we will see shortly—coincides with (Oriental) Tet. We should not overlook those places
where Buddhist tradition informs these films. Buddha is present in different ways in The Scent of
Green Papaya: in Khuyên’s drawings, the resemblance between Mùi’s and Buddha’s faces is
uncanny; when Mùi looks at the papaya seed, it is as if she were holding the world between her
fingers; finally, at the end of the film, the camera moves up from Mùi and her child to a statue
that may be one of Buddha. A central element in Buddhist faith is cyclical time and reincarna-
tions. The retarded son and Cyclo’s father “reincarnate” into Cyclo—the former dies on the
night that Cyclo is reborn; the latter “dies a second time to save [him].” Cyclicity is important
in Cyclo: while the slaughterhouse is full of dead pigs, the year of the Pig is about to start; fire-
crackers set on a toy fire truck explode and trigger the son’s death, run over by a real fire truck;
the cat that had disappeared when the father died reappears at the end; Cyclo has problems delin-
eating where his father stops and where he himself starts. Finally, as far as colors are concerned,
the end of Cyclo marks the beginning of a new cycle: xanh (green of the papaya/Mùi)—yellow
(of the papaya/Mùi and of the retarded son)—xanh (blue of Cyclo).
14. “We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground
stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 22). These three
scenes communicate with each other through “micro-cracks”—here, for instance, the fire truck.
15. The Poet’s nosebleeds occur on three very significant occasions: right before the Poet sees the
fetishist force the sister to drink and and then to urinate in a basin; when he opens the betel palm

flower; and after he “gave” the sister to the businessman. Do they betray humanity in him, or,
on the contrary, his inhumanity? The three nosebleeds also foreshadow the sister’s defloration
(three customers).
16. In Cyclo, both episodes illustrate the constant threat to innocence.
17. In The Scent of Green Papaya, we never see the papaya being eaten; in Cyclo, ripe papayas are
devoured.
18. Both in The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo, red intrudes in the xanh-yellow pattern. In the for-
mer, red, as the color of papaya’s ripe flesh, is the color of love and passion, the scenes in which
Mùi wears a bright red tunic or red lipstick are scenes of (unconscious) seduction; in the latter,
red is mostly linked to blood, to society’s violence (killings, squaring of accounts, rape). In both
films, however, red intervenes between the two other colors: Mùi’s green clothes/red
lipstick/yellow tunic, and yellow/red/blue paint. These two specific occurrences of red may rep-
resent the blood that usually accompanies birth, in this case Mùi’s and Cyclo’s “(re)births.”
19. Given that Cyclo is eighteen years old and that the action takes place in January 1995 (the year
of the Pig started on January 31, 1995), he was born in 1976 or 1977, in the year of the Dragon
or the Snake—both animals represented with their tongues out.
20. This “fish-face” recalls the nickname that children give the retarded son and his mother’s words:
“you’re my little fish.” The fish is another illustration of these two young men’s shared path.
21. Two important scenes dealing with the family and present in the script were cut out of the film.
In sequence 65 in the script, the grandfather and younger sister prepare a chicken to offer the
ancestors for Tet, in the penultimate scene (sequence 76), Cyclo bows before the altar and
addresses his father: “I still haven’t been able to fulfill the wish that you expressed before you
died. For that, I ask you to forgive me. Until recently, I always felt that you were somewhere
beside me to guide me, to keep me away from misfortunes. But now I know that I’ve lost you,
really lost you. And I can only rely on myself to take care of myself and the family. May your
spirit protect us all, grandfather, big sister, little sister, and me, your son Kiên” (Tran and Trémo-
let 126-127). Both these scenes make clearer the resurgence of family values at the end of the
film. Since it occurs right before the Tet events and Cyclo’s redemption, Tran could very well
have retained sequence 65. Sequence 76, however, emphasizes the definitive loss of the father
(“really lost you”) and overshadows the preservation of his spirit’s guidance that is clearly pres-
ent in the film through the reference to the cat’s return.
22. When asked by Jean-Marie Dinh if culture will prevail again once Vietnam’s present mutation
is over, Tran replied that the frenzy toward consumption was only a passing stage.
23. I would like to thank Dang Anh Tuan for providing me with this information, and for creating
a website on Vietnam, the text of which is in green, yellow, and blue on a black background:
www.limsi.fr/Recherche/CIG/ivietnam.html

Tran Anh Hung Orphan Tales

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Tran Anh Hung’s Orphan Tales

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The Scent of Green Papaya:

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Cyclo: A Hyper-Realist Present and

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Vietnam’s Journey from The Scent Of Green Papaya to Cyclo

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