El amante

I first saw this movie when I was younger, as one of the most graphic "mainstream" movies available. That was before I ever knew what the word "soft-core" meant.

I watched it again, when I was older, and I finally understand it. The quiet sequences and unemotional facade of the female lead are no longer just boring filler between the exciting love scenes. Perhaps it's because I needed a little more life experience to know the unexpressed feelings of the female character and the expressed feelings of the male character. Sure, this movie is about taboo and tasting forbidden fruit. This movie is about sex. But this movie also has very strong depictions of the other emotions involved in the affair. Shame. Guilt. Racial and social prejudice. Love which is explored when both parties know there can be no future. Emotional detachment born out of necessity, as a "defense mechanism". Being ostracized by your peers, and life in an environment rife with vicious rumors. But mostly the shame and guilt. It's made clearer to me what a former lover of mine may have felt.

To live through all that and then to watch this movie makes for a very personal, moving experience. I can't recommend it to everyone, since every movie experience is unique. But I can say that "The Lover" is much, much more than just an excuse for graphic love scenes. It's a story of a reminiscence... a first time... a shameful secret... a hidden love, fostered through hardship and burning into the mind of the narrator an indelible, permanent mark of memory of a first, life-shaping lover...

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.

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.

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.

In French colonial Indochina, a French girl (Jane March) has two older brothers, Pierre and Paul. Pierre is their mother's favorite despite being a thief and a bully. They're in fear of him. She is repatriating him to France after stealing from an opium den. The family is running out of money for him to steal. On a Mekong river crossing, the girl meets a rich jobless globetrotting playboy Chinaman (Tony Ka Fai Leung). She tells him that she's 17 despite being only 15 and a half. He gives her a ride to her boarding school and starts an erotic affair. Her friend Helene Lagonelle is the only other white girl in the school.

This is a solid example of the sub-genre of exotic erotica. It's got beautiful naked people but it's not quite overt softcore porn. It's more cinematic than the classic Emmanuelle or other pornographic B-movies. The exotic locations look beautiful. It is visually stunning. The acting is competent. These are actual actors. On the other hand, the story is paper thin. The plot isn't much to talk about but that may be besides the point.