The Lover

The Lover

1992 "She gave her innocence, her passion, her body. The one thing she couldn't give was her love."
The Lover
The Lover

The Lover

6.8 | 1h55m | R | en | Drama

A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.

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6.8 | 1h55m | R | en | Drama , Romance | More Info
Released: October. 29,1992 | Released Producted By: Renn Productions , Films A2 Country: Vietnam Budget: 0 Revenue: 0 Official Website:
Synopsis

A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.

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Cast

Jane March , Tony Leung Ka-fai , Frédérique Meininger

Director

Olivier Radot

Producted By

Renn Productions , Films A2

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Reviews

funkyjuju "The Lover" is, without a doubt, a stunning film to look at. Every frame is like a beautiful lost photograph and the setting is lively and exotic, particularly for a Western audience.One of the film's main strong points is its weather. For the majority of the film, the sun is shining and everyone is sweating attractively. It gives the whole film a feeling of ripeness which is probably symbolic of our young female lead's blossoming sexuality. It's only towards the end of the film, when the romance is starting to falter, that the weather breaks into rain which is both sad but also slightly releasing.Jane March's acting is not stellar by any stretch of the imagination but it doesn't really need to be. She fits perfectly into the style of "nymphet" beauty but her character is almost... boring. She seems disinterested in everything around her, even during love scenes or the scenes when she fights with her family. The character also borders on cliché with her casual, teenage cruelty and thin, white dresses that beat you over the head with their ham-fisted symbolism.Tony Ka Fai Leung's character is a lot more interesting. It would have been easy to make him very suave and predatory when he makes a pass at March's character but instead, they opt for making him nervous and intimidated by her. Leung's performance is wonderfully nuanced. There is one scene in particular, where he's consumed by rage due to the girl's treatment of him and forcefully has sex with her. He keeps himself more or less composed but you can see the anger and hurt bubbling underneath that calm demeanour.The love scenes are, at times, gratuitous but they are mostly gorgeous to watch and very cleverly done. There's beautiful scene of the girl being washed by her lover afterwards which is lovely and tender.The film's meandering plot will bore some viewers but I liked it because it mirrored the lovers meandering love affair that was doomed from the start. However, the ending of "The Lover" was unsatisfying for me. It just felt unfinished and vague, like they didn't know how to end the story effectively.Overall, The Lover is a visually exquisite film which is interesting enough to not be written off as simple pornography but it's not quite strong enough to be considered an art film, in my opinion. However, it's definitely worth a watch and will probably play on your mind for a while after your viewing.
simona gianotti No doubt that the central element dominating The lover is eroticism. When I first saw this movie I was a little more than a girl, and I was simply but intensively overwhelmed by the high erotic quality of those encounters between a young girl, a little younger than me and a young Chinese man, being emotional and physical involvement mixed up with a sense of mental confusion: I wondered and was not able to figure out whether this story was just sex, or if any trace of feeling or spirit was to be found in it. I have seen it again recently and being now a young woman, older age makes you look at things with a different and more mature eye and to find a meaning: the young girl doesn't ask herself too much, just because her young age allows her not to think, she disregards the rational and emotional complications of love, she is endowed with that powerful mix of innocence and longing for experience which lead her just to enjoy the full pleasure and sensual side of love, without understanding if their's a soul, or simply a single feeling inside that penetrating body. The young man is, on the contrary, experienced enough to know perfectly what he is searching very clearly, and he is honest since from the beginning, admitting his life is based on pleasure. We are not told what will remain of these encounters, consumed in a shabby garconniere, as everyday life goes on outside, but I believe that they were so deeply lived and felt, that their future life will always keep signs within their souls. Indeed, in the novel, in the end we find the young man who comes to Paris many years later and calls her revealing that he has never stopped loving her and he would love her until death.What I understood and rationalized is the real quality of those love scenes which once appeared to me as too strong, too obscene, too strong, even embarrassing to watch. What Marguerite Duras and Jean Jacques Annaud wanted to render was physical pleasure in its purest form: her body, in between that of a girl and that of a woman, his glabrous body with his smooth skin resembling a statue, make their sexual encounters truly transcend reality. Everything is physical but but not carnal, body, not flesh, explicit but at the same time never indulging in vulgar detail, displaying but concealing at the same time, a celebration of sexual pleasure and attraction at its best, pleasure taken and given always in the shade, pleasure never shouted, but softly accompanied by evocative music and sublime photography. A movie aimed at an adult audience, however, I admit that some of that overwhelming involvement experienced as a girl, has remained and is still able to stir strong emotions.
lorrie-26 I just watched this movie for the first time last week and have not been able to get it off my mind. I have watched it several times since then and have bought both the books written on this subject and also the DVD and soundtrack. I think everything about it was beautiful, from the music, the scenery, and the acting. I think the most sensual parts of the movie are when the Chinaman first sees the young girl on the ferry and is watching her from the automobile and then leaves the car and approaches her. He is supposed to be a worldly man and experienced with women but yet trembles as he offers her a cigarette. Another sensual scene is in the car driving to Saigon and he moves his hand close to hers and begins touching her fingers and then she clasps his with her thumb and then they are clutching hands. Also he watches her all through this movie, on the ferry, while they are driving, while they walk together, in the restaurant and then while she is dancing with her brother, you can see the jealousy. He is a gentleman and a gentle man. He offers her his coat when she is chilly and really does love her. I think those scenes are more sexual than the sex scenes. I think her leaning on the ferry in the beginning of the film with her hat on and her dress blowing in the breeze and her leg on the railing shows how sexy this young girl can be. There is something about that scene and the same stance at the end of the movie that is sexy and the Chinaman saw that. I do think she loved him and knew that nothing could come of it so she was not going to say she loved him or cared for him. I think she was acting tough because she didn't want him to think she cared for him. I almost think she was the seducer. That she was ready for an adult encounter and he was the one that showed up. Why wouldn't anyone want him. That shot of him as he departs from the car and then turns around was something else. He is so handsome. I wanted to know where I could go to get one of him. Yes she is ready for a sexual adventure and she goes for it. I felt very sad that the two of them could not spend the rest of their lives together. When he tells her at her mothers old plantation that he spoke to the father and tried to tell him that a love like theirs only comes once in your life was so touching and then says the father would rather see his son dead than with a white women and she remarks back that she will be leaving anyway and that she doesn't love him. I thought she was mean to say that but then she was mean in a few scenes. I thought he had more class than she did and manners as well. I cried at the end, I guess because the love had no place to go once she left. He was left with nothing and she was moving on to whatever. Then she realized that she did love him. After reading so many articles on the book and the author it seems that the Chinaman was the great love of her life. That the relationships she had did not work out all that well and he of course left her know that he had always loved her. This relationship that they had lasted for a year and a half according to the book. In that much time you can become very attached to someone. If there really wasn't anything there on her part as far as love or caring I don't think she would have stayed with him that long. She was young she would have moved on. This is definitely the all time favorite movie for me. I am haunted by it and cannot stop thinking about it. Jane March did a great job as an unexperienced in the love department young girl. Tony Leung Ka Fai, uhmmmm let me say this, wow what a handsome guy who makes the screen sizzle when he is on it. Those shots of him in the beginning and at the dance and his wedding all I can say he is something. His dress is impeccable in this movie. He really looks like a rich aristocrat and behaves as one as well. Loved the movie and will never forget it.
tintin-23 There are three interconnected themes in this film: an impossible love story in the colonial environment of pre-WWII Vietnam, relationships, and the constant crossing of boundaries and borders.I was rather disappointed while reading more than a dozen American reviews of this film penned by professional film critics. Only one reviewer seemed to be knowledgeable about the author and the position she occupies in the world's literature. These film critics concentrated somewhat obsessively on the sexual scenes, which take a total of nine minutes, or 8% of the film's duration. In my opinion, these movie reviews are the result of the genetic puritan attitude that prevails in the American society. Or maybe the reviewers were asleep during most of the film and only woke up for the "good parts?" "The Lover" has nothing to do with pornography. It depicts an intense passion, where, of course, sex plays an integral role. Annaud had no choice but to include this aspect of the story, and he did it in a meaningful and artistic way.The Chinaman has the advantage of being older, male, and wealthy, but he is Chinese -- and she is white. He has "lived it up" in Paris, where he had many liaisons. He is an expert at lovemaking. But he is also vulnerable as an only child, orphaned by his mother, dominated by his father. The Chinaman uses love and lovemaking to shore himself up against his insecurity. He is the archetypal romantic lover, talking to her of love, death, and eternity. His love, while passion-filled and pleasurable, is also an agony and physical torment. He is not at all the dominant, forceful seducer whom she craves. However, we must be careful to remember that we see his desire for the girl only through the narrator's subjective memories.By contrast, we know the feelings of the girl, even though time has certainly altered her memories. Right from the start, the girl refuses to use the language of love, denying the romantic concept of being his only love. The girl's desire for the Chinaman's body is firmly grounded in sensuality as well as in curiosity, but the first appeal she feels upon meeting him on the ferry is for his wealth, his luxurious car, his diamond ring. However, as she sails back to France, we learn that she comes to the realization that she may have loved him all along.As the affair progresses, other figures creep into the sexual imaginary: the young brother, the older brother, her friend Helen, and of course, her mother. There is a mother-daughter love/hate relationship. Duras depicts her mother as an unhappy, driven woman. She admires her mother's quality of perseverance, yet Duras cannot forgive her mother for the life of poverty and degradation, nor for her mother's excessive love for her oldest son and apparent failure to love her two younger children.And of course, Duras cannot forgive her mother's opposition to her becoming a writer. With her lovemaking, the girl experiences a triumphant sense of separation from and superiority over her mother. She is trying to eradicate the mother, to escape the stranglehold of their mutual hatred. The daughter's drive toward the lover, toward social disgrace and reputation, without understanding it herself, is to "punish" the mother.The girls' love affair with a Chinese man is also a giant step toward her liberation from the tyranny of her elder brother. It is somewhat ironical that the older brother's gambling, drug-addiction, and social marginalization are mirrored in the way her lover spends his days gambling and smoking opium.Finally, there is an undercurrent theme which runs throughout the film, which is that of boundaries and borders. The film opens with a ferry ride across the Mekong and ends with an ocean crossing, signaling the constant crossing of frontiers and borders: geographic of course, but also racial, cultural, and sexual. These are confronted and sometimes dissolved as the poor white girl of French parentage meets her wealthy Chinese lover in the Cholon, the ill- repute Chinese district of Saigon. She, a white girl, was raised among natives, almost as a native. He is a native who experienced the western culture and somehow longs for it.There is also the transitory period of the girl's adolescence, between what remains of her childhood, and the onset of her womanhood. On the ferry and on the steam liner, the girl wears a child's pigtails, but she is dressed in women's clothes. The gender roles are somewhat blurred, too: she wears a woman's dress, but also a man's hat, in a color that signifies femininity. The boarding school in Saigon is home mainly to the abandoned mixed-blood daughters of local women and French fathers. The girl has an intimate friendship with Helene Lagonelle, which is ambivalent and perhaps sexually charged. The girl is unable to treat the Chinaman with even a modicum of courtesy when she is with her brothers because he is Chinese, not white. In the public bus, she rides in front, separated from the locals, yet in her private home, she lived as a native. In the cocoon of the "garconnière," she is separated from the crowd on the street by only thin cotton blinds. There is even a meta-boundary crossed, as Duras takes her memories and feelings and externalizes them in the form of her writing. What has been internal and private becomes external and public."The Lover" is an autobiographical love story set in a post-colonial environment. We owe the remarkable transcription of this literary masterpiece to the artistry and creativity of Jean-Jacques Annaud. In this production, he has successfully combined two art forms, the beauty of the written word with the fascination of the image. I believe that the film has been, for the most part, misunderstood in this country, and I would recommend a second, more open-minded look at it. It will be a worthwhile experience.