lasttimeisaw
Marguerite Duras' autobiographical recount of a forbidden amour fou in 1929 French Indochina, between a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old French girl (March) and a Chinese man (Leung) twice her age. This film adaptation is beautifully shot by DP Robert Fraisse, for its stunning exotic scenery and erotic lovemaking intimacy, who earned the film the sole Oscar nomination.THE LOVER is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's sixth feature, four years after his animalistic faux- documentary THE BEAR (1988), a theme he would re-trace in TWO BROTHERS (2004) with tigers. Here, Annaud brilliantly lays the stress on the human's most primitive libido over the opposite sex in this immoral passion act, the sex scenes are the most notorious takeaway of the film, they are artistically graphic and starkly intense, but also shimmers with a tint of obscurity under the shadowy light of the so-called "bachelor room", where their trysts take place. Their sex attractions are alike, the vast differences of the opposite sexes between two cultures, two races and an upended social classes (she is from a poor French family where her widow mother works as a local French teacher in a shabby town, whereas he is a layabout who has an affluent father and a family business to take over) makes room for the story to develop in this manner.Annaud is also no stranger to the Chinese soil, he would shoot SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET in 1997, which for political reason along with the director himself, was banned in China; nevertheless, his latest work WOLF TOTEM (2015), a Chinese-French co-production based on a popular Chinese novel is a huge box-office performer this year, one-time even selected as the Chinese entry for the upcoming Oscar's foreign picture race (which was denied by the academy since its co-production status). In THE LOVER, his treatment of the Chinese man is slightly different from Duras' words, his inferior masculinity is moderately muffled by a veil of oriental politeness and endurance, especially when encountering the provocation of the girl's brash elder brother (Giovaninetti). But, when he is alone with the girl, a contradicted struggle between love and trade torments him and soon his weakness lays bare completely when he succumbs to opium and complies to the family-arranged marriage, but a final advent of the black limousine does suggest his futile but lingering attachment in their liaison. 1992 is such a banner year for Tony Ka Fai Leung, currently has three leading performances in my year's top 10 list, his portrayal here establishes a disarming mien as "the lover", a man whose job is to love, nothing else, incapable of changing his or his lover's fate.Accompanied by Jeanne Moreau's resonant voice-over, reciting Duras' segments of texts throughout, mainly we are channeled into the girl's perspective of the affair, her precocious nature and non-conformist behaviour, all through, in spite of her poverty-ridden background, she is the one monopolises the higher standing in this romance, ascribed to the self-imposed superiority of a colonist, even during their first sexual intercourse, she makes the first move. Tangibly, there is something morally sickening in the colonised land, apart from their blatant interracial sex trade. Such a formidable role proves to be a double-edged sword for the débutante Jane March, whose comely but aloof pretence matches the character fittingly, but also would curb her future career as an erotic desire.Frédérique Meininger, who plays the girl's mother, in her very limited screen-time, manages to unfold a great range of emotional spectra from jadedness to chagrin, agony, then utter disillusion. Suffice to say, the film is an above-average piece of cinema erotica, which gives a shot in exploiting the colonised culture, along with some R-rated explicitness, e.g. a pair of gorgeous buttocks humping to-and-fro on the screen.
elianne basset
This film is my favorite. It shows how a Chinese man in his thirties falls in love with a 15-year-old girl. Although she is not conscious of the love she feels for him because of the social pressure she has to face, young Marguerite Duras (the film is based on her autobiography)completely abandons herself to the man and discovers true love. To me, the way the film was shot is quite poetic, even artistic. Far from conventions, The Lover is an immersion in colonial Asia. You can smell,ear,taste and touch what the characters are experiencing: something unique that even time can't erase.
The_Film_Cricket
I would love to have added 'The Lover' to my very short list of entertaining sexual adventure movies, up there with 'Emmanuel' and 'Young Lady Chatterly'. I could, if I had ever sensed that the movie was headed in that direction.When the lovers in this movie are together, their scenes are thorough enough to fit the bill of those two other titles but when the movie veers away from that it turns drab, dull and lifeless. By that reckoning, we sense that we know the real purpose behind the making of this film.Based on a book by Margaurite Duras, the movie tells the story of a French student (Jane March) in Indochina in the 1920s who falls in lust with a rich Chinese aristocrat (Tony Leung) twenty years her senior. They see each other and each knows what the other wants. Soon they are meeting regularly for a secret sexual affair.Because 'The Lover' is treated seriously I had a hard time finding a foothold. The movie is constructed as a story of two people from different worlds who are divided by racial lines at a time when crossing such lines meant grave consequences. But the movie doesn't worry about those elements very much; they seem treated at throwaways to what we they think we really came to see. The movie doesn't even have time to credit the characters with names. March and Lueng are simply listed in the credits as 'The Young Girl' and 'The Chinaman.The rest of the movie we can predict. She is bored in her life and is looking for adventure. He is rich and is headed back to an arranged marriage and a lifetime of unhappiness. The characters don't have time to deal with these issues. The movie is more interested in their affair, which is not constructed out of personality but out of the kind attraction that make up one of those glossy Playboy videos.'The Lover' was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, a director who's work I have not come to like very much. His films are beautiful to look at but miss the human element to the machinations of the plot.This is a good-looking movie. The cinematography by Robert Fraisse is sumptuous and both leads are attractive people but I wish the movie had made up its mind. As an adventurous sex romp it might have worked. But it opts for a serious story and 'The Lover' doesn't have a brain in its pretty little head.
jaeminuf
The beauty of this film and its heartbreaking romance lie in the unspoken, between the acrid disavowals of love, in the bitter context of colonial racial, socio-economic, and gender relations. Tony Leung and Jane March superbly portray the tensions existing within the multiple layers of colonial relations - the emasculation of the Chinaman vis a vis the privilege of the girl's whiteness playing out along with the shame and barbarity of the girl's poverty vis a vis the civility and access of his Chinese (not even native) affluence. Ultimately, the schism wrought by the sociocultural constraints of their disparate backgrounds is what tears them asunder or rather dooms their romance from the beginning.What Annaud does brilliantly is to portray the lovers' yearning without giving voice to it overtly. He depicts it through a series of disavowals, through the wounds they inflict on each other, and allows the viewer to fill in that which cannot be uttered.As for the graphic portrayals of sex, I am usually the first to decry graphic sex scenes. However, in this film, the sex scenes again plays out the dynamics of the characters as a part of the larger colonial relations. The tenderness of this film and of its romance lie within the beautifully cinematographed sex scenes as well as in the violence and poignancy that exists throughout rest of the film.
