The Lover

Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of Marguerite Duras, who was born in French colonial Vietnam, this film chronicles the sexual awakening of a young French girl who falls passionately in love with a Chinese scion of a rich trading family who have his marriage already arranged. They make love passionately in a way which more truthful than is usual on the screen. This film is intensely visual, written by a major French script writer, Gerard Brach, and narrated by the powerful world weary voice of Jeanne Moreau. If you have experienced consuming sexual passion and the pain which it can engender, you will understand this film. If you haven't, this film will give you that vicarious experience. It is all the more truthful because although the relationship is interracial, the passion transcends, whereas the cultural differences block the fulfilment of their true love. It is about how people miss love trapped by convention and common sense. This is a flawless film, beautifully shot--a minor classic, much under-appreciated.

The Lover is not just a movie, it is sensual, breathtaking and intimate sometimes bordering on voyeurism. From the outset the scenery directs the action taking the viewer into a world of a young girl and a Chinese man that embark on a doomed love affair in 1929 Colonial Vietnam. Jane March plays the young 15 year old 'girl'. That is all we know of her as she stands on the front of a ferry cruising the Mekong Dekta. She dressed in a cheap short sleeved dress, straw hat and high heels and heavily rouged lips that belie her age. She is on her way back to a girls' school in Saigon when she is first 'seen'. The second time she is summoned to a black sedan where she meets The Chinaman, smouldering Tony Leung, sitting in the back seat of the car attired elegantly in a tailored white suit. He offers her a ride to her school where a simple, impulsive kiss on the window leads to a frustrating passionate love story laced with cultural misunderstandings. This movie is fueled right from the start with sexual tension. March and Leung are perfect as the two nameless leads who are taken on this journey of first discovery, through latent but palpable lust, then finally to ruin. She cannot love him and he cannot commit without betraying his family's honour and heritage. She will be nothing but his lover, never his wife. I felt a deep sadness for these people, their isolation evident as they silently scream for their individuality in a world that will not accept either of them together, or apart. Jean-Jacques Annaud has done for The Lover what he did for The Bear and The Name of the Rose, gave us characters that are haunting and memorable. The cinematography here is sparse, pale so as to give the story a poignant futility. Gabriel Yared's score is sensual almost brutally so as these characters' bodies come together while their souls never connect. This movie is not for the faint of heart. It IS sexual. The scenes border on artful pornography. Annaud never quite goes that far as to allow it to delve into hard-core, but the scenes are hard to watch. They are so intimate that we believe the leads are making love before our eyes...but we are compelled to watch, transfixed by the intimacy. Throughout we are reminded of the toll the affair has had on the young girl with the tremulous grosgrain narration of the always excellent Jeanne Moreau. She underscores the events and emotions of the sometimes perversely detached lead character. The Lover is based partly on the life of Marguerite Duras of whom March's young girl is almost a dead-ringer. Annaud imbues this story with every emotional nuance forcing us to use its characters as a mirror of our own hidden desires. This is a movie that made me long for what is hidden deep within my secret heart...and a little afraid of what I might find there.

Last night I saw "The Lover" on video. I couldn't speak or move for a few moments after the final credits. I just sat there, half staring, half crying.

A poor French teenager from a dysfunctional family is leaning over the railing on a barge sweating through southeast Asia. A meticulously groomed Chinese man in a three piece white suit is staring at her, telegraphing that if this isn't, for him, love at first sight, it is at least his obsession for the next two hours of film time. He, gingerly, aflutter in a stereotypically feminine way, approaches. She is blase, rock hard. He offers her a ride. In the back of his chauffered limousine, they sit in opposite corners. While he is looking out the window, inch by inch, his hand moves toward hers. With contact, she looks even more bored, even more blase. By the time he gets her to her school, her head is thrown back, and his hand is in her lap.

The actress playing the teenager looks, in various shots, to be anywhere from a naive and buglike fifteen to a jaded twenty three. Since much of the rest of hte movie is devoted to full body nudity and graphic scenes of sexual intercourse, her youth, both as an actress and as a character, was an issue when the film was first released. I didn't see it for that reason. I was convinced it was exploitation of men's fantasies of making it with a child.

But the film didn't feel that way to me at all. To me, it seemed to capture really well the un self conscious power and ammoral curiosity a teenage girl experiencing her sexuality for the first time can experience. I was grateful for that. I've never seen anything else like it on film. It's so rare that a woman is allowed to f*** and not fall in love, to retain a curious, animal look even during orgasm.

The sex scenes talked to me. They communicated as much as the scant dialogue the personalites, desires, strengths, weaknesses, of the characters.

This would have been a very different movie -- a much shorter and grimmer one -- had the man, the "Lover" of the title, been anything other than what he was. He was not a rapacious, exploitative beast. He was, rather, a romantic. Confused, worshipful, easily hurt. Chinese in a time and place when being Chinese made him less than she in some way, in spite of his relative wealth and her poverty. Vulnerable, because he was so in thrall to her, and she was merely curious about him, and hungry for physical pleasure.

Many scenes in the movie spoke to me loudly about race, power, sick family systems, money, sex. I don't want to describe them for fear of spoiling this movie for anyone else. But I'll mention -- the scene where he takes her ratty family out to dinner, their disdain for his race, his effort to not reveal that he is insulted, and how he deals with his pain once he gets her alone. His wedding. Her waiting for him; his never coming. Her resonse to the pianist playing Chopin on the ocean liner.

"The Lover" -- thumbs up.

My wife and I were enraptured and thoroughly enjoyed this gem. Deeply evocative and so real that we nearly felt the rain and hot humidity, we were swept along on this unique journey. The external and newsgroup reviews did not ring true for us. Well OK, the characters were very sad and March delivered stilted lines at times, but there was so much magic to see and hear! She sizzled. He struggled. They both yearned for what could not be.

Those harbour and river scenes were no Hollywood set or computer graphics, but just had to be the real thing: Vietnam! The reviews said 'not erotic' and 'like Penthouse'...?!? Just look beneath the surface: even though both characters are trapped in cultural barriers and subsequently repress so many emotions (especially the girl), they escape into the blissfully unreal world of the rented room where emotions run deep albeit confused.

You will not find the usual American 'formula film' composed of glitz, action, intrigue, syrupy sweetness and a predictable ending. Instead here is a film that is complex yet simple, both beautiful and ugly, about separateness and unions, and the sufferings of those who love but cannot love. We were captivated, enchanted. If you are prudish or do not like 'foreign films', then avoid this film. However, if you have ever travelled in Asia, if you love creative cinematography, if you enjoy small subtleties, if you like an insight into the past and a time of strong desires... then see this film! It was refreshing, and we did not want it to end.

I continue to be amazed at what works in this huge experiment in the social imagination we call film.

One thing that really impresses me is how one image will stick in your mind. One image around which it seems the whole rest of the project revolves and supports. I usually write IMDb comments very soon after seeing or reseeing a film.

In this case, I was so struck by that one image I resolved to wait three months before commenting. It stuck.

That image is the one which is used in the promotion and presumably is what the filmmaker considers its essence: the 15 year old girl in defiantly non-school clothes with an incongruous man's hat on the ferry. She is observing and consciously observed. It is we who observe her and enjoy her sensuality then and later just as the Chinese observer does. He is our surrogate, defining the strange situation of a being in the wrong place: Chinese being then more of a 'minority' in Vietnam than Europeans.

Exotic ordinariness. Emerging awarenesses as justification for being. No, more: revelling in existence. Transition as destination.

It is odd how charged this one image is, and how competently it justifies the whole project. Just as the lover is left puzzling why, so are we. So are we, and the fact that no easy answer appears is why this sticks so.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.