The End of Perfumery as We Know It? A Ciceronian Response

The “-ization” of Perfumery

I love to explore perfumes by house. My preference is to experience a cluster of offerings and see whether there is a theme or an approach or a style running through them, such that it becomes possible for me to have a basic grasp of the house's outlook or vision. This is becoming more difficult to do than it was back in the twentieth century for houses such as Guerlain, Acqua di Parma, and Dior, for a variety of reasons. François Demarchy, the head perfumer at LVMH, signs the perfumes of some of the formerly independent houses now operating under the umbrella of the conglomerate. Guerlain, however, has changed quite a lot for another simple reason: Thierry Wasser is not Jean-Paul Guerlain. On top of all of this administrative upheaval, nearly all twentieth-century perfumes seem to have suffered under reformulation, as perfumers “struggle” (more on this below...) to comply with the restrictions imposed by first the IFRA and now the European Union.

Some of the smaller—but still relatively big—houses, too, have been subsumed under the management apparatus of larger companies with the result that the offerings of formerly independent lines such as Marc Jacobs and Vera Wang, both currently under the aegis of Coty Prestige, appear to be moving closer and closer together through a compositional convergence process which may have something to do with the now shared sources of aromachemicals being produced by and coming from the same factories. I have noticed some convergence of patterns in the cases of Jean Patou and Rochas as well, which seem to have begun when they were added to the Procter & Gamble portfolio. The way in which the perfumes under such corporate umbrellas are being marketed also appears to be undergoing a process of homogenization.

Similar forces may be acting upon Guerlain and Dior, despite the fact that the creative director is not the same in those two cases. In addition to owning Sephora, LVMH is the overlord of several other formerly independent and quite distinct houses as well. Some of the trends which I've noted, such as the use of solid plastic sample vials, are no doubt superficial. Someone at LVMH thinks that it's better to protect the liquid inside than to use transparent glass, despite what are arguably the latter's aesthetically superior properties and practical superiority to the consumer, insofar as it is possible to see exactly how much—if any—liquid is really contained within the vial. The opaque plastic sprayers often seem to be defective and even more often contain an unexpectedly small amount of perfume. But, again, these sorts of practical business matters do not necessarily reflect anything about what is going on at the perfume end of things.

However, other trends, such as the rampant flankers being launched after the namesakes of the once-classic perfumes of both Guerlain and Dior do seem to have effects upon the world of perfume proper. I have not seen any Mitsouko or Diorissimo flankers yet, but Shalimar and Addict flankers abound, and all of the newer perfumes seem to be launched in waves of flankers: Insolence, Insolence eau de toilette, My Insolence, Insolence Eau Glacée. Insolence Blooming, Insolence Shimmering Edition.... Idylle, Idylle eau de toilette, Idylle Eau Sublime, Idylle Duet Rose-Patchouli, Idylle Duet Jasmin-Lilas. Idylle extrait de parfum, ...

Shalimar and Flankers

The mediocre quality and staggering number of Shalimar flankers does not inspire confidence in the once-glorious house of Guerlain: Fleur de Shalimar, Eau de Shalimar 2008, Eau de Shalimar 2009, Shalimar Initial L'eau, Shalimar Parfum Initial, Shalimar Parfum Initial L'Eau Sensuel, Shalimar Black Mystery 2007, Shalimar Eau de Parfum 2009, Shalimar Edition Charmes Eau de Parfum, Shalimar Fourreau du Soir, Shalimar Légère, Shalimar Ode à la Vanille, Shalimar Ode à la Vanille Sur La Route de Madagascar, Shalimar Oiseau de Paradis, Shalimar Parfum Initial à Fleur de Peau, Shalimar Talisman Byzantin. Shalimar Yellow Gold.

All of this flanker folie might not be a matter of concern, were it not for the unfortunate fact that the once-classic perfumes, including the original Shalimar, all appear to have been serially reformulated and some appear even to exist simultaneously in different versions marketed to different niches. Do the Guerlain boutique bottles of Shalimar contain a different perfume than what is found at discount drugstores such as Walgreens and CVS? I suspect that they do, and rumors to that effect abound.

What in the world is going on here? Why would a company do such as thing? Well, because they know that most of the people who purchase perfume at the Guerlain boutique know a thing or two about perfume, or at the very least are used to wearing the real thing, not some muzak facsimile tantamount to a flagrant act of self-desecration. As versions proliferate, the Tower of Babel problem of communication—already bad, given that we all seem to have divergent tastes and variable sensitivities to the many different components of perfume—can only grow worse.

As a business strategy, I cannot find fault with the practice, if indeed it is one, at least not in the short term. In the long term, however, I fear that such tactics are bound to lead Guerlain down the not-so-felicitous path taken by Coty and Halston before them. Coty did manage, it appears, to rebound financially from its early missteps by creating the Coty Prestige division and acquiring many well-regarded designer names. But Coty renounced its status as a great perfume house long ago, and there has been no looking back. Coty is a successful company not for creating great perfumes—though they did once upon a time—but because they have managed to sell lots and lots of mid-range and bargain bin bottles to many, many people over the years.

Guerlain and Dior bore the cachet of exclusivity in the past, but that glory has been slowly abraded by their very own practices in recent years. True, each of these houses has its niche-esque branch producing exclusive perfumes targeting more sophisticated perfume users separately from their big-profit mainstream launches. Nonetheless, I am finding it harder and harder to take these niche-esque launches very seriously. Many of them strike me as little more than gimmicks.

Guerlain Muguet is sold only on May 12^th, for about $600 a bottle. Lily of the valley can only be constructed, so the perfume is obviously synthetic. No one is traveling to the ends of the earth to collect tiny, delicate, white bell-shaped lily of the valley cups for enfleurage in fresh goose fat by artisans back at Grasse. No, it is created in a lab. The mainstream launch Idylle is also a lily of the valley perfume, which costs about 10% of the price of the special edition “niche” perfume Muguet. I'm afraid that in this case I cannot find fault with one astute reviewer's plaint (at Fragrantica):

And I do think this "only for sale one day a year" concept is ridiculous. And for $580 it should include a big, juicy man to spray it on me whenever needed.

Guerlain issued a preemptive response to complaints on the part of such curmudgeons with this public relations statement to Allure magazine in May 2012:

"It's not the lily of the valley that's expensive; it's the addition of natural extracts," says perfumer Yves Cassar -- in this case, rose and jasmine. "These flowers require many petals to produce a tiny bit of oil."

Nice try. So why does this perfume cost five times more than either Nahéma or Chamade, both rose perfumes from the very same house? Why does it cost five times more than Chanel no 5, said to contain a fair dose of the precious natural jasmine of Grasse? In fairness, I should add that the 1,345 special edition bottles of Muguet for 2012 were decorated with “a removable green-glass-and-gold necklace from Gripoix, a 143-year-old jewelry house in France.” So the ultimate explanation of the price would seem to be not the natural jasmine and rose essences, but the bling.

At the same time that such gimmicks as necklace-wrapped bottles continue in a steady stream, the price of regular Guerlain perfumes has been plummeting, as they have flooded the discounter market. A 100ml bottle of Eau de Cologne Impériale can now be had for $40 or even $30, if one shops around. The Mitsouko reformulation, too, seems to be foundering, as bottles can be had at any of the discounters for a fraction of the original MSRP, which, I might add, was never anywhere near the prices being asked by Guerlain for the “niche” launches.

When I see such developments, I wonder, at the first level, how such companies can be both mainstream and niche, business savvy and artistically driven, at the very same time. The evidence is to me overwhelming that the suits have a lot more to say about what is going on at these houses than do the creative directors and the perfumers themselves. Or is that these days the creative directors and perfumers are business people first, and designers only second?

I also wonder about developments such as the “Private Label” phenomenon. Perhaps this idea originated at a board meeting of the Estée Lauder group, since not only the eponymous house but also that of Tom Ford, subsumed by the same group, have pursued this strategy with what appears to be resounding success. The first question which came to my mind upon encountering one of the Private Collection perfumes at Estée Lauder, Tuberose Gardenia, was: why do they cost more than the perfume whose name is Private Collection? Can someone please explain this to me?

To be honest, I've always found this sort of two-tier strategy to be in some ways preposterous. It may have started with Calvin Klein—a trendsetter in so many ways and in so many different realms, including perfume—who began mass-marketing jeans to a Levi's-obsessed culture now quite some time ago. Calvin Klein jeans never cost much more than Levi's, and yet they carried with them the prestige of a fashion designer, rather than the homey comfort of a dry goods store, and this, I believe was the secret to their success.

The colonization of the mass market by famous designers has approached ubiquity by now. But the nagging question remains: if a designer of haute couture has a line also at HLM or Target, does that not demonstrate that their designs can be effectively executed for very little money? So what accounts for the difference in price? In the case of perfume, the suggestion—usually implied but sometimes explicitly stated—is that the ingredients used in the “private” perfumes are far more costly and rare than those used in the “public” perfumes. Still, a puzzle remains: does not the success of the latter demonstrate that such costly ingredients are in fact dispensable, unnecessary to the production of great perfumes? Or perhaps the entire pretext is nothing but a lie. Think, again, of synthetic lily of the valley: how expensive can it possibly be?

Beyond the seeming illogic of claiming both exclusivity and accessibility to the masses under the very same label, I continue to wonder about it as a marketing strategy. I am reminded in some ways of Starbucks' decision to begin producing instant coffee, thereby cutting into their very own profits on the piping hot liquids served up at the cafés by real-live baristas. The explanation in that case is, I imagine, that some people are satisfied with instant coffee and prefer not to leave their homes or offices. But of course most people who drink instant coffee, drink cheap instant coffee, and the very thought of a cup of instant coffee may be anathema to those who drink real coffee such as Starbucks and related coffee dealers purvey. At the same time, the people who drink instant coffee are not about to pay $1 a cup to do so, which is about what the Starbucks packets cost at MSRP. Even purchased on sale, the packets cost multiple times that of a cup of Folgers or Taster's Choice crystals spooned from a glass jar.

Starbucks also partnered with Tassimo for a time (or maybe that's misleading, since they both appear to be owned by Kraft at this point, which for all I know may be owned by General Electric, which for all I know may have joined forces with Citibank by now...), offering coffee discs to be used in the home with the patented Tassimo machine to produce coffee said to be just as good as creations produced by live baristas at the store. I was “gifted” a Tassimo machine by the Gevalia company, oddly enough, after having ended my subscription to their coffee service some time before. The logic appeared to be to coax me back to Gevalia with this new machine, for which I would naturally need some discs, if I were to use it.

I did not bite, but I did indeed acquire some discs of Starbucks coffee and for a while was using the machine on days when I wanted a very quick and clean coffee preparation. The big virtue of the machine is that it produces no mess whatsoever, unlike my favored methods of pump expresso maker, Melitta drip filter, or Bodum French press. Is the coffee produced by a Tassimo machine as good as a fresh cup from Starbucks? No it is not, but it is pretty good, good enough, perhaps to have motivated Starbucks' termination of the relationship.

I was surprised to learn that Starbucks subsequently teamed up with Keurig, which has taken over the quick-brew-at-home market, it seems, though I must say that I was very unimpressed by the sample of Keurig coffee which I was offered one day when walking through Sears to enter the mall where I then proceeded to stop at Starbucks for a real cup of coffee.

What does any of this have to do with perfume? you may not without good reason be wondering. I see these as business tactics, one and all. I do not believe that Tom Ford Private Collection perfumes cost any more to produce than do Tom Ford Public Collection perfumes, though they cost four time more to own. I am basing this bold conjecture on a few recent testings of some of these perfumes, the most unbelievable of which to my nose was Tom Ford Neroli Portofino, a glorified version of Mauer & Wirtz 4711 Original Eau de Cologne. The two creations do not smell identical, and I own that the Tom Ford is probably a bit better, but it commands something like fifty times the price of the traditional eau de cologne launched back in 1792.

Perfumery Placed in Perspective

The “bling thing” obviously works, and I have no principled objection to bling, per se. While bling is not perfume, there are concept houses, I'm thinking especially of Bond no 9, for which bling is an essential part of their image. I don't have a problem with that. If bling makes some people happy, then bling is good. My point in the above critique is only that traditional houses such as Guerlain have been changing their strategies to focus more on bling and less on perfume.

Perfumery is firmly anchored in the world of companies and commodities. People buy and sell perfume just as they buy and sell any number of other things for all sorts of different reasons. What makes perfume unique among all commodities is that the liquids themselves—within the bottles, however they may be marketed—map out a distinct world of their own, a parallel universe, if you will: the olfactory universe. This is a universe unknown to the vast majority of people, because they do not think of perfume in any but functional terms.

The apparatus which sustains perfumery is intimately connected to this functional outlook, regardless of how religious perfumistas may begin to become about the object of their love. Perfume houses are run for the most part by business people, who enlist perfumers to produce market-worthy products for them to sell for profit. Many of these business people could be selling literally anything: zippers and buttons, cars and boats, cereal and milk.

This fact is easy to see in the strange partnerships formed in recent years as corporations have grown larger and larger, swallowing up all sorts of ostensibly disparate businesses into one über-entity with the power to squelch most competitors emerging from below. A favorite example of mine is Unilever. Believe it or not, Breyer's, once noted as an independent source of excellent ice cream, is produced by Unilever, famous especially for products such as body wash and deodorant.

In perfumery, one of the biggest stretches may be Procter & Gamble, which added the historic houses of Jean Patou and Rochas to its portfolio, leading many to fear the progressive toiletrification of the perfumes of those houses, a fear which may have been justified, given what happened in the reformulations of some of their perfumes. The general approach of the corporate sharks at places such as Proctor & Gamble and Unilever is ruthlessly to maximize profit. “Swim or sink” is the governing philosophy, and when a subsumed entity such as Rochas does not pull its weight, it will lose the protection of its “guardian” in short time, as was reported by some fragrance community members to have happened a while back, although this was never confirmed and may not be true... at least not yet.

These corporate realities are obviously not going away during our life time, but one nice thing about the world of perfumery is that it has an existence independent of that realm. There are no doubt plenty of perfume hacks, but there are also people who create beautiful perfume as an expression of their unique creativity. When the corporate takeovers begin to seem overwhelming, I pause to think always of the independent perfumers who against all odds continue to create original elixirs for us to enjoy. How they manage to stay solvent is a testimony not only to the excellence of their work but also to their belief in what they do.

I do not, however, naïvely believe that all niche houses are oriented toward the production of excellent perfume. My impression, especially in the last couple of years, is that self-proclaimed niche perfume houses have been rapidly proliferating like rabbits for the same reason that investors turned to cell phone developers some years back, anticipating the ever-greater role that such devices would play in people's lives. Being “niche” has itself become a sort of sales strategy or gimmick.

In the case of perfume, the advent of online fragrance community websites which permit people to converse and educate themselves about perfume has evidently been recognized by a number of savvy entrepreneurs, and new houses continue to emerge as the community of self-proclaimed perfumistas continues to expand. The avalanche of new launches is the result of a combination of factors, one of which is surely the sheer number of new niche houses whose ventures involve the production of a set of perfumes to coincide with the creation of the house.

I do not envy the struggle of artistically driven perfumers as their professional world becomes progressively populated by profit mongers who have arrived on the scene to seize upon this moment in history to benefit from this relatively new cultural fascination with perfume. The numbers are still small, relative to the other market niche populations for just about any other product, but the potential for growth is enormous, given the evident allure of perfume for people from all walks of life. The promotion of perfume as a luxury product potentially as profitable as upper-echelon timepieces or fine leather items—or even fine wine—does seem to hold a great deal of promise, in part because modern people have become fashioned to some extent into epicureans, unbeknownst to themselves.

Witness the very creation of the Food Network, an entire television channel dedicated to the art of food! Every middle class housewife today is familiar with trendy phrases for gourmet cuisine ingredients such as EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil), when only a couple of decades ago, those same women would have been firmly entrenched in Hamburger Helper and canned vegetables territory. The world of food has changed in part because of the opportunities laid out before us at supermarkets.

We can buy better food today for less money, and for this reason alone people's tastes have evolved. They may not change fundamentally—someone who hates anchovies or eggplant always did and always will—but the nuances and subtleties which even average people are now capable of appreciating has a great deal to do with what has been made available to them by business people attempting to profit from these new manufactured desires.

To return to the case of perfumery, I have to say that I do not understand many of the recent developments at all. Let's take, once again, the IFRA restrictions. As far as I know—and please correct me, if I am wrong—the IFRA is a self-regulating body comprising people from the perfume industry. So how can perfume houses blame the IFRA for the restrictions, if they are ultimately self-imposed? Now that government bureaucrats have gotten in on the regulation game, the rules are obviously going to change, and it's a whole different story when laws start being imposed with penalties for failure to comply. Nonetheless, before the bureaucrats began their officious meddling, the IFRA was a body of perfume professionals issuing guidelines to themselves, was it not?

All of this reminds me of a Twitter which I saw flitting about the world wide web a while back. Guerlain was sending out a message to the effect that Mitsouko was going to be reconstructed by Thierry Wasser and brought back to its former glory. Please correct me if I am confused in my logic here, but if it is true that it is possible to bring Mitsouko back to its former glory, then it is false that Guerlain was forced to reformulate the perfume as a result of the IFRA restrictions. By sending out that message, Guerlain effectively convicted itself of duplicity. Is it true, or is it not true that the mangling of Mitsouko was a result of an attempt to comply with IFRA restrictions? If it is possible to bring the perfume back to its former glory, then it is obviously false that it was ever necessary to mangle it in the first place. QED.

A Ciceronian Response

Enough lamentations. There is probably little if anything that any of us perfumistas can do to stop any of the above enumerated nonsense. The time has arrived at last, therefore, to adopt the approach of Cicero—both a Stoic philosopher and a statesman—and invert the Necker cube or switch our attention to the bottle half full. When one recognizes that one has no power to change the circumstances in which one is mired, it becomes time to change one's attitude toward those circumstances and to adopt a new perspective. I am happy to be able to share with you, my fragrant friends, that I recently experienced an epiphany of sorts which resolved all of the above quandaries in one fell swoop.

Flankers and multilaunchers and corporate conglomerate homogenization continue on, but we can adjust our attitude toward perfume just as easily as the big houses can pump out swill. It may sound bizarre at first, but the truth is that the bottle half empty is also half full, for our lives can be enriched by availing ourselves of the opportunities for enhanced olfactory experience afforded by the sheer fact that niche perfumery has become viewed by business people as a profitable endeavor over the past few years. All of the above complaints about the state of perfumery commence from a fundamental confusion: in reality, we do not love perfume, but individual perfumes. We do not love humanity, but human beings. We do not love perfumery, but some of the products of the enterprise of perfumery.

Out of all of the perfumes being produced at any given time, we can and do love only a few. So why should thousands of irrelevant and gimmick-laden launches matter to us in the least? So long as there are a few hold-outs—and there are—perfumers who continue to create the sorts of elixirs which we prefer to wear, is there any harm in millions of gallons of vat-produced chemical soup being pumped out at factories and poured into garish hat-topped flasks? Do we complain about the existence of Spam and pork rinds, though we would never eat them? Of course not.

The massive increase in perfume production in recent years is analogous to the explosion in recent decades in interest in wine, especially in the United States. While wine has a rich history in Europe, it took a while for it to be recognized as the beverage of choice to be imbibed with meals in this country. Today, wine connoisseurs abound, and perfume connoisseurs, too, are on the rise, for the very same reason. We are fortunate, I believe, to have these new universes to explore, and I mean that quite literally.

The olfactory universe has always been filled with smells, but in recent times it has become inhabited by more and more perfumes. We can travel through the olfactory universe by sniffing perfumes one after the other and pushing another pin into the grand olfactory map, penning reviews along the way. In this way of viewing perfume testing, not every perfume is a “final destination”, a place where we feel prepared to hang our hat for more than a very short time. No, the new, ever-more densely populated perfume world is full of dead ends and dark alleys. But how could it not be? So is the real world. We can travel through both of these universes with the expectation of learning more about ourselves and the inhabitants of these worlds. We may not need to revisit some of the places we've been, but we will have grown through the journey itself.

Just as world travel is not the same thing as looking for a home, we can test perfumes for the experience and then move on. The fact that a place to which I have traveled is “a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there” does not make it any less valuable to have seen. And the same is true for perfumes which I may never choose to wear again, but from which I learned something though I wore it only once, even if only that I immensely dislike a certain combination of notes.

Perfumes and places and persons are all analogous in this regard, which can be seen by considering a third metaphor, that of personal relationships. We do not wish to marry every person whom we meet. Nor do heterosexuals or homosexuals wish to marry half the people whom they meet. Indeed, most of the people whom we will ever encounter will not rise above the status of passing acquaintance. We can regard perfumes in precisely the same way.

There are people who still today prefer to have a single signature scent, but perfumistas seem to be considerably more promiscuous, always on the look out for new prospects, so to speak. The fragrance community websites and Facebook groups devoted to the discussion of perfume are all encouraged by the unending flux of new perfume being poured out by the ever-expanding legion of houses.

For those of use who have moved beyond “perfume monogamy”—a strict loyalty to a single perfume or brand—the recent developments in the perfume industry, whereby some houses and perfumes may fall from our favor, simply opens up new avenues. Divorce is sometimes a good thing, permitting us to exit one chapter of our life in order to embark upon a new journey. Perfumes are destinations in one sense, but perfume testing is a journey, and we should perhaps be relieved that the vast majority of perfumes which we “visit” and “meet” are “places” and “persons” which we can do quite well without encountering ever again.

What makes a perfume special is that it stands out from the crowd. What makes the pursuit worthy is because it is so challenging in a sea of mediocrity to find something worth our sustained attention. The world is filled with things of every conceivable quality. It's up to each person to sift the proverbial wheat from the chaff and to select and distinguish true friends from everyone else. We will not and should not agree about which qualities mark a person or a place or a perfume as special. That's the beauty of heterogeneity and a reflection of human liberty.

The Scent of "The Scent of Green Papaya"

Synaesthetic Suggestion and Subjectivity 
in the 1993 film by Tran Anh Hyung

Set in Saigon, Vietnam, in the 1950s, The Scent of Green Papaya relays, on its most obvious level, the tale of a young peasant girl, Mui, who has been sent away from her home to work as a domestic servant as a result of hardships endured by her family after her father's premature death. In some respects, certainly for Western viewers, the story follows a familiar plot, that of the fairytale Cinderella.

There are important deviations from that morality play, however, including the fact that in this film virtually all of the women appear to be victims of circumstances beyond their control. 




Harridans and shrews are nowhere to be seen, and in the one scene in which a woman scolds another, a man is the ultimate cause of her lashing out. The mother-in-law upbraids her daughter-in-law for having failed to please her husband, what the mother takes to be the explanation for her son's flight from the home. 

For the most part, aside from that single scene, the women of the film are quiet, gentle creatures, hard-working, well-meaning, and resigned to their fate. Even the mother-in-law spends the duration of the film in her room lightly beating a drum as she mourns the dead.

The men in the story can be interpreted, in some sense, as the women's oppressors, but this, too, appears to be a result more of the social and economic context than of their own maliciousness. 

The superficially Cinderella-esque plot develops rather differently in the final section of the film, although it is true that upon reaching womanhood, Mui is ultimately “rescued” by a man, a composer whom she met and admired from afar while working as a domestic helper when she was still a child.

Basically, as cynical as this may sound, she trades one domestic role for another. The indentured servant becomes an indebted wife. After toiling away for more than ten years for other people, Mui, upon reaching womanhood, is “rewarded” by becoming the wife of the man for whom she was working, and also the mother of his child.

Some Western viewers have no doubt voiced complaints that the story is objectionable in one way or another, and I do believe that in order to be able truly to appreciate this work it may be necessary to “evacuate your critical mind,” as I recall a yoga instructor once exhorted those participating in her class to do (including me, who of course rolled her eyes). 

For some such a feat is easier said than done, but it does seem to me that the plot of this film is arguably beside the point, and the wide-ranging and penetrating feminist and neo-Marxist critiques to which it could easily give rise need to be set to one side if one is to discover what it was that the director here intended to convey.

The film garnered much praise from critics but much less from nonprofessional reviewers, many of whom seem to have found it affected (“artsy-fartsy”) and over-contrived. Other viewers complained about the slow pace and relative dearth of action. The Scent of Green Papaya received awards for its cinematographic excellence, and therein lies the true value of this creation, not in its banal plot.

To focus on the narrative of this film is to miss the beauty which unfolds in infinite complexity from the opening and all the way to the final scene, as the deliverances of the senses are presented so as to create a quasi-synaesthetic sensory odyssey of sorts while capturing and conveying the perspective of the central protagonist at the same time.

The Buddhist philosophy undercurrent of The Scent of Green Papaya, which is unmistakeably symbolized throughout the film, is finally made graphic (flagrant?), for those who somehow failed to grasp it earlier, with the concluding shot being none other than a statue of the Eastern sage.

But if this film is Buddhist in orientation, what does that mean? And can the manifest sensuality of so much of the film be reconciled with Buddhist philosophy? 

Scenes of ablution are interwoven throughout the film, but especially near the end, once Mui has achieved womanhood, bathing takes on a decidedly sensualist cast.



On one level, the message, if you will, of much of this film may seem to overlap with the ethical vision of the ancient Greek Stoics, according to which one must steel one's self against adversities over which one has no control. In this regard, the film might seem to share what the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the life-negating aspect of resignation common to most religions, which was a bit later pithily summarized by Karl Marx in the phrase “Religion is the opium of the masses.”

Buddhism is a religion, albeit a godless one, but it enjoins the same attitude toward life on earth as the theistic religions: that our attachment to earthly things, all possessions, including our very life, is vain and otiose. 




Desire is to be squelched, since only then, without the constant yearnings to succumb to temptation, can one be at peace with oneself, living harmoniously and in equanimity with nature. In keeping with this Buddhist-cum-Stoic outlook, one way of understanding the docile acceptance by Mui of her station in life is as an expression of her acceptance of this fate and refusal to struggle against it.

It does seem as though all people are constrained by chains of one variety or another, though most of them are invisible. The men and boys of the film, no less than the women, are born into a context rife with expectations of what they must be and do, and those expectations undeniably play a role in shaping the persons whom they eventually become—to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon the individual's relative propensity toward freespiritedness, on the one hand, and malleability or tendency to conform, on the other. Their ostensibly privileged status certainly does not render the males immune from suffering.

There is another way, however, of viewing Mui's way of looking at and attitude toward the world, and even for those who reject the teachings of the “preachers of death,” there are truths here to be pondered for those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a nose to smell. This film illustrates that far more important for the quality of one's own life than external factors beyond one's control are internal factors and the perspective which one adopts toward the people and things in one's experience, a Stoic point, to be sure, but an aesthetic one as well.

Obviously there are extreme cases, where people are physically imprisoned in nightmarish scenarios created by others, and which make it impossible for those shackled to enjoy their own subjective experience of the world. In The Scent of Green Papaya, the focal protagonist retains sufficient liberty to be able think about and to perceive the world as colored by her own values. Her interactions with people and things evince a quiet nobility, despite her low social standing.

Mui lives in a bubble of sorts, entirely unaware of what life might be, were she not situated where she has found herself, as the servant of a well-to-do family. Having received no education, she is illiterate and powerless—not only economically, but also conceptually—to extricate herself from her indentured role. In reality, her station is not so different from the billions of women throughout history whose only hope for economic and social security has been marriage to a man capable of providing those things.

The institution of marriage was initially established to formalize the relation between a man and some of his property, his wife, who took his name and essentially gave her life over to him in agreeing to propagate his name through the production and nurturing of his progeny. 



Today marriage has taken on new meanings, but it will always be tainted by its purely pragmatic and sordid origins, which prevented most women for most of human history from realizing their creative potential beyond the narrow ambits of the home. Many women have flourished, no doubt, in such a role, and many do still today, but for thousands of years they had no viable alternative and so cannot be said to have freely chosen what became their primary vocation. 

In theory, of course, such a lifestyle may well be every bit as valid and worthwhile as any other choice which a woman might make—a point underscored by recent gay marriage activists—provided that it really is her own choice and not imposed upon her from outside.

What is unique about The Scent of Green Papaya is that, rather than negating the servant girl's value, this film reveals the preciousness of her subjective engagement with reality, what is typically ignored in social critiques of gender- and class-based inequities. The focus of social critics has typically been on improving the circumstances of such persons, not on revealing their unique perspective on the situation in which they find themselves. The ironic result is that the victims are often doubly negated. They already have no power over the system in which they exist and which rules their lives, but they also have no voice.

This film presents an anthropological tableau, not a social or moral critique, in displaying the economic stratification as well as the patriarchy of the society in which Mui finds herself. Early on it may appear that a critique is forthcoming, as the males of the family are painted in somber shades as capricious and despotic. The father and head of the household, a troubled musician who appears to be dissatisfied with his bourgeois family life, disappears at periodic intervals with the family's savings to indulge in debauchery with prostitutes until the money has all been exhausted, at which time he returns home.

Even the smallest boy of the family manifests ignoble behaviors toward Mui which suggest that in the future he will follow in the footsteps of his father, and will perhaps even grow up to mistreat women. No good will come of any it, suggests the plight of the father, who having apparently contracted venereal disease during the last of his fugues of fornication, succumbs shortly thereafter, leaving the family forever and permanently behind.

Truth is Subjectivity

A social critique can of course be made of this entire situation, with the women at the beck and call and mercy of the men in 1950s Vietnam—as most everywhere else—but what director Tran Anh Hung does instead is to focus upon the subjective perspective of Mui and the lush beauty which surrounds her like a halo. The girl has an artist's sensibility and finds value in every single thing she encounters. She views the world in a state of awe at the infinite richness contained within it, and she perfectly encapsulates the maxim that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Mui takes note of the minutest of details in her experience, watching an ant attempt to hoist a piece of rice or a toad as it croaks. The house is structured openly, making it possible for various creatures, insects, lizards, frogs, to lead their separate existence while harmonizing with the people also present.

Mui's attitude toward these creatures is very different from most people's, and none of what are often regarded as pests appear to be so from her own perspective. Rather than setting out to destroy the ants, as the son of her master does—lighting a candle and dripping wax upon them as he watches them slowly die—Mui observes in a state of awe the beauty of their struggle to survive.

A ten-year lacuna of Mui's life is not covered by the film. The story is taken up again when she is twenty years old, at which point she seems physically different but still a child at heart and in her interactions with the world. In the opening shot of this final section of the film, Mui seems almost retarded, although the intention appears to be to depict her as saintlike—in something like a state of transport achieved through natural mysticism. 

There have been many varieties of mystic throughout history, with some holding a pantheistic view, finding divine elements or “gods” in all that they encounter. Others have understood their extraordinary experiences as direct communications with a canonized God in a particular religion such as Christianity.

Mui's ecstatic encounters with nature are reminiscent of those of many religious mystics throughout history, including Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582AD). The difference between Mui and the mystics of established religious traditions is that she does not possess any of the cognitive or conceptual apparatus to be able to articulate her interactions with God—or the divine—as manifested through nature. It is noteworthy, however, that many orthodox mystics, too, have insisted that the content of their experiences was ultimately ineffable. Incapable of being transmitted to others through human language, the phenomena giving rise to the mystic's experience could only be gestured toward.

As a young woman, Mui seems even less inclined to talk—close to mute—by now, and one suspects that this was how she managed to survive pure and innocent in a system where many analogous people throughout history have suffered corruption at the hands of those more powerful. Having been adopted as a surrogate daughter by the woman of the house (who had lost her own daughter), one senses that Mui benefited from the protection afforded her by this relationship.

Once Mui is sent to work for the composer in his house, preparing his meals and tending to his domestic needs, he ends up falling in love with her, and ultimately forsakes his fiancée, a well-to-do young woman of society who appears to have no use for or real interest in the composer's true calling, music.

The unmistakeable message is that the musician, like Mui, is nobler in spirit than his would-have been wife of high society, who comes off as shallow and superficial. 

The woman becomes outraged upon recognizing that her lover and would-have-been husband has fallen for his live-in servant. She throws a tirade before storming out of the house, leaving her engagement ring behind.




The musician's infatuation with Mui during what is a nearly speechless section of the film is revealed through the sketches he has made of her face. It appears that he finds himself drawn to Mui as to a kindred spirit of sorts. The possibility of course exists that the father of Mui's child, too, like the troubled musician at the head of the household where she worked as a child, may grow restless and forsake bourgeois family life. But one senses that Mui is unlikely to be devastated by such a development, because every single thing around her is miraculous to her. She has no identity to lose, because she blends in with the environment no less than do the toads and the lizards and the ants.

Music as a Metaphor for Scent

How can the subjective experience of such a person be captured on film? A virtual infinity of colorful images carefully composed and juxtaposed make up the visuals of The Scent of Green Papaya, but the musical score—comprising both original material and well-known classical music pieces—is just as important, and together the two help to create the synaesthetic illusion of scent throughout the film.

In some ways, the music serves a metaphor for scent, with rapid transitions and modulations signaling abrupt emotional changes, just as occurs when a scent, invisible to the eye, eventually penetrates a person's consciousness as the molecules make contact with olfactory receptors and a message is transmitted to the brain.

I have often felt that scents are colored. I do not suffer from—or is it enjoy?—the literal synaesthetic conflation of sight and scent. I do, however, strongly associate certain scents with certain colors. The Scent of Green Papaya synaesthetically suggests for me the sense of scent through the use of breathtakingly beautiful visual images and sounds, both natural and manmade. As Mui shreds fresh papaya, the music and the image together produce a scent-like experience because it seems to be right there before me.

At first the unpeeled papaya smells vegetal and green, somewhere between Pierre Balmain Vent Vert and Frédéric Malle Carnal Flower, but then it becomes fresh and fragrant and tart like a bright eau de cologne such as Parfums de Nicolaï Cédrat or perhaps one of the Hermès Jardins. The film is literally filled with clean, limpid, aqueous, and vegetal scents, and the musical sound of water—whether dripping or splashing—suffuses the entire work.

The smell of rice in the kitchen is evoked as dinner is prepared, but the rice is scented, as beautiful as Gianfranco Ferre's Ferré eau de parfum, which includes a succulent rice note.

When, as a young woman, Mui applies red lipstick for the very first time, my memory of that scent becomes activated. I think of the smell of Guerlain Météorites or Frédéric Malle Lipstick Rose.

When the composer's fiancée flirts with him at the piano, I sense the presence of Chanel no 5. When she becomes angry, throwing a temper tantrum and destroying beautiful pieces of ceramics before storming out of the house, all of her charm evaporates away, leaving something harsh and ugly, an aura of caustic chemical soup (selection of an apt example is best left to the reader...).

When the composer enters Mui's private quarters for the very first time, I smell something with musk, but a clean, light, sweet and innocent heliotrope-laced musk such as Kenzo Vintage Peace. 

The green incense burning in the home brings to my mind Comme des Garçons Kyoto.

As the couple shares playfully in the process of educating Mui, I sense the juxtaposition of L'Artisan Parfumeur Voleur de Roses and Drôle de Roses. The couple lives harmoniously together, respecting one another as fellow creatures in the Buddhist rock garden which is their home, far from the fray of urban contention and strife.

All of these image-scent associations emerge from my own subjective experience and are likely unique to me of all viewers, but therein lies precisely what I find so fascinating about the sense of scent: our associations arise out of our own memories, shared with no one else in all of space and time. Our interactions with our environment and our reactions to what we see and smell and hear have as much to do with us as they do with the things which serve as catalysts of sorts in causing a flood of memories to rush as from nowhere to the forefront of our mind. Whether we like or we dislike what we see has a great deal to do with our prior experiences and beliefs.

I must admit that I myself disliked the heavy-handed sexual imagery near the end of The Scent of Green Papaya, and feel that the effect would have been much stronger more subtly applied, but overall this film is a richly scented evocative gem and well-worth any perfumista's time.

Should Class and Gender Inequity be Aestheticized?

Social criticism is important. Without it, no progress would ever have been made toward the betterment of the circumstances of marginalized and diminished persons, including all persons who are non-White or lack a Y chromosome—or both. Strides have been made toward equalizing the opportunities of the people of all races and both genders and, more recently, sexual orientations, although there is much more to be done.

Even in ostensibly free and enlightened Western nations, the diminished status of females, in particular, is evidenced by economic statistics revealing that they continue to be paid significantly less than their equally qualified male counterparts for performing the very same work. In other words, women continue to be regarded as less than full-fledged persons equivalent in moral value to males, as has been the case throughout human history. This is a valid concern, and some viewers may find that The Scent of Green Papaya conveys a conservative perspective too ready to condone inequalities and injustice. Such criticisms have a great deal of merit in their own right, but morality and justice are not really what this film is about, when all is said and sniffed.