Cameron Crowe, who also wrote this, his directorial debut, seems able to tap directly into his feelings and memories as a teenager. His autobiographical Almost Famous (2000) was set backstage at rock concerts, a much different world than the Seattle of Say Anything, but the characters played by Patrick Fugit and John Cusack could be twins in the way they earnestly try to be true to themselves. Both characters have career ambitions that are not respectable (to become a rock critic is not much better than becoming a kickboxer, in the eyes of parents). Both are so consumed by their dreams that they ignore conventional ambitions. Both fall in love with apparently inaccessible girls, although Lloyd Dobler has the good luck that Diane loves him, too.
The film follows them gently and tactfully through the stages of romance at eighteen. When it finally finds them in the backseat of a car and perhaps about to have sex, it doesn’t descend into the sweaty, snickering dirty-mindedness of many modern teen movies, but listens carefully. “Are you shaking?” she asks him. “No,” he says. “You’re shaking,” she says. “I don’t think so,” he says. When she comes in late the next morning—the first time she has not called home to let her father know where she was—he is angry, but loves her enough to cool down and listen to what she has to say. The way she describes what happened is one of the movie’s flawless moments.
The two lovers both have confidants. For Diane, it is her father, played by John Mahoney as a reminder that this actor can be as convincingly nice as anyone in the movies. He exudes decency. That quality is right for this role, in which we learn that there is a great deal Diane doesn’t know about her father. When the IRS looks into the financial records at the nursing home he runs, Diane goes to a local agent to argue her father’s case. And the agent (Philip Baker Hall), in a small but indispensable role, tells her flatly but not unkindly, “But he’s guilty.”
Lloyd’s confidant is Corey. This was Lili Taylor’s first film after the landmark Mystic Pizza (1988), which also introduced Julia Roberts and Annabeth Gish. Here she plays a husky-voiced folk singer who has been dumped by the one love of her life, Joe. “I have written sixty-three songs this year, all about Joe,” she tells Lloyd at the party. She sings some of them (“Joe lies when he cries . . .”). She provides advice, but because her specialty is unrequited love, she can’t quite understand Lloyd and Diane, who share true love. Then Diane devastates Lloyd with the opinion that they should stop seeing each other. She won’t say why. (“This girl is different,” Lloyd says during his period of mourning. “When we go out, we don’t even have to go out, you know?”)
Lloyd’s exile in the wilderness away from Diane works because Cusack makes us feel the pain. He turns to his other confidant, the sister he lives with (played by his own sister Joan). He plays with his nephew, a little would-be kickboxer. He stands across the street from Diane’s house, playing love laments on his boom box. He doesn’t understand this sudden rejection, and because we do, we feel all the more for him. When they finally get back together, Crowe’s dialogue reflects his need. She tells him she needs him. “Because you need someone, or because you need me?” Lloyd asks. And immediately answers his own question: “Forget it. I don’t care.”
Say Anything depends above all on the human qualities of its actors. Cusack and Skye must have been cast for their clear-eyed frankness, for their ability to embody the burning intensity of young idealism. A movie like this is possible because its maker believes in the young characters, and in doing the right thing, and in staying true to oneself. The sad teenage comedies of recent years apparently are made by filmmakers who have little respect for themselves or their characters, and sneer because they dare not dream.
Scent of Green Papaya
NO MPAA RATING, 103 m., 1994
Tran Nu Yen-Khe (Mui at Twenty), Lu Man San (Mui at Ten), Truong Thi Loc (The Mother), Nguyen Anh Hoa (Thi, the Old Servant Woman), Vuong Hoa Hoi (Khuyen), Tran Ngoc Trung (The Father), Talisman Vantha (Thu). Directed by Tran Anh Hung and produced by Christophe Rossignon. Screenplay by Hung.
Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music. The Scent of Green Papaya takes place in Vietnam between the late 1940s and early 1960s, and is seen through the eyes of a poor young woman who is taken as a servant into the household of a merchant family. She observes everything around her in minute detail, and gradually, as she flowers into a beautiful woman, her simple goodness impresses her more hurried and cynical employers.
The woman, named Mui, is an orphan—a child, when she first comes to work for the family. She learns her tasks quickly and well, and performs them so unobtrusively that sometimes she seems almost like a spirit. But she is a very real person, uncomplaining, all-seeing, and the film watches her world through her eyes. For her, there is beauty in the smallest details: a drop of water trembling on a leaf, a line of busy ants, a selfimportant frog in a puddle left by the rain, the sunlight through the green leaves outside the window, the scent of green papaya.
We understand the workings of the household only through her eyes. We see that the father drinks and is unfaithful, and that the mother runs the business and the family. We see unhappiness, and we also see that the mother comes to think of Mui with a special love—she is like a daughter. As Mui grows and the family’s fortunes fade, the routine in the household nevertheless continues unchanged, until a day when the father is dead and the business in disarray. Then Mui is sent to work as the servant of a young man who is a friend of the family.
She has known this young man for a long time, ever since they both were children. He was the playmate of her employer’s son. Now he has grown into a sleek and sophisticated man about town, a classical pianist, French-speaking, with an expensive mistress. Mui serves him as she served her first family, quietly and perfectly. And we see through small signs that she loves him. These signs are at first not visible to the man.
The Scent of Green Papaya, which was one of 1994’s Oscar nominees in the Foreign Language category, is first of all a film of great visual beauty; watching it is like seeing a poem for the eyes. All of the action, indoors and out, is set in Saigon in the period before the Vietnam War, but what is astonishing is that this entire film was made in Paris, on a sound stage. Everything we see is a set. There is a tradition in Asian films of sets that are obviously artificial (see Kwaidan, with its artificial snowfalls and forests). But the sets for Green Papaya are so convincing that at first we think we are occupying a small, secluded corner of a real city.
The director, Tran Anh Hung, undoubtedly found it impossible to make a film of this type in today’s Vietnam, which is hardly nostalgic for the colonial era. That is one reason he recreated his period piece on a sound stage. Another reason may be that he wanted to achieve a kind of visual perfection that real life seldom approaches; every small detail of his frame is idealized in an understated but affecting way, so that Mui’s physical world seduces us as much as her beauty.
Some will prefer the first two-thirds of the film to the conclusion: There is a purity to the observation of Mui’s daily world that has a power of its own. Toward the end of the film, plot begins to enter, and we begin to wonder when the young pianist will notice the beautiful woman who lives under his roof and loves him so. There is an old, old movie tradition of the scene where a man suddenly sees a woman through fresh eyes, and realizes that the love he has been looking everywhere for is standing right there in front of him. These scenes can be laughable, but they can also sometimes be moving, and when that moment arrives in The Scent of Green Papaya, it has been so carefully prepared that there is a true joy to it.