The Lover is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' minimalist 1984 novel. Set in French Indochina in 1929, the film explores the erotic charge of forbidden love. Jane March plays a French teenager sent to a Saigon boarding school, while Tony Leung is a 32-year Chinese aristocrat. They look at each and they both see a blinding white flash; it's kismet. He offers her a ride in his limousine and soon they meet in his "bachelor room" where they revel in a wide variety of
creative sexual encounters. However, they both realize their love is doomed. She comes from a troubled family that includes a mentally-disturbed mother (Frederique Meininger) and drug-addicted brother (Arnaud Giovaninetti). It also appears that her family would not approve of an interracial tryst. But then neither would his family, since in order to inherit his father's wealth, he must not break from a traditional Chinese arranged marriage. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi
Annaud and his collaborators have got all of the physical details just right, but there is a failure of the imagination here; we do not sense the presence of real people behind the attractive facades of the two main actors.
Too bad that the film is marred by the vices of international productions, as it deals with issues seldom shown in American movies, such as the power of sexuality.
The worst part of the dialog is given to the writer. She has to say one pedantic line after another, and overall, the narrator's part is just too wordy.
On the whole, L'amant strikes me as aloof and disconnected. It has aspirations of being elevated and artsy but offers no reason for empathy or audience connection with the characters. In the end I didn't really care whether or not the two lovers stayed together or parted ways. A beautiful but rather hollow film.
January 18, 2009
Randy Tippy
Super Reviewer
This movie is set in 1920s Saigon. On a chance encounter on a ferry crossing a rich Chinese man in his 30s meets a French school girl. They start an affair. He loves her but she seems to stay with him for his money as her family are poor. He wants to marry her but is forbidden because of their race and his father has
planned an arranged marriage for him. She leaves for France but he never forgets her. Movie content is a little uneasy at times. Also sexually explicit.
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