L'amant

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...

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.

L'Amant is a very beautiful, haunting and sensual film. The characters are perfect and acted in a minimalist way that's refreshing.

I see here that the main objections to this film are: 1 .. Not enough character development 2 .. The film does not have a clear direction to where it's going 3 .. Too slow 4 .. Too much sex (for some people if a film has explicit sex it can't be good)

All these objections are pointless:

1 .. The characters here are ordinary people, not that interesting by themselves. It's the love story that's interesting. Both of them know they have no future and try to pretend it's not love. I am sick of films in which the characters are sure they love each other after 30 minutes of "character development".

2 .. The fact that this film does not follow a clear path it's one of it's qualities. It adds more drama and the characters themselves are confused and don't know where they're going. The whole film plays like a dream of love and to request "clear direction" it's pointless.

3 .. Ahh! The "too slow" argument. There are films in this world that make you think about you, your life and the world that's around you. Surely you need some TIME to reflect on that. Short attention-span is a bad thing :).

4 .. This film is about love. The fact that they are shown having sex makes them real persons, with real bodies not some film characters. Sex is an escape from the world around them and I don't think it's too much, too explicit or some nonsense like that. It's so hard to have a film with sex it it that's not trivial! This is a masterpiece by this fact alone.

The persons who "though up" these arguments took the main strengths of the film and complained about them. This for me it's proof enough that they didn't understand this film or that the film didn't struck a single chord in their soul. Short attention span is the main plague of films now and the lack of it is the reason the french make such great films! Please try to see it again and not in a hurry. It's not light cinema! It's great cinema!

It's not often I get to see a movie like this. The story of L'Amant potrays a most complex and provocative relationship between a young French girl (Jane March) and a Chinaman (Tony Leung). The two lovers' attraction towards each other are purely physical, but there are a lot of psychological burdens and suffering that they can't break free from, since the two of them are psychologically washed-up people who lives within the shackles of society that they live in. At times they treat each other cruelly while at times they treat each other with tender affection, yet we don't know whether they feel true love for each other or not. That's where the story gets very interesting and different.

The sex scenes are indeed graphic, but by no means done in bad taste or just for the sake of sex. The film is much more than about lust, it is about two lovers who found refuge in each other's arms. Jane March and Tony Leung gave great performances, showing the subtleties of conflicting emotions that they had to endure. Beautifully paced storyline with great atmosphere and soundtrack will make this a worthwhile movie experience. Very highly recommended.

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.