THE LOVER (1992) ★ ★ ★
The 1990s was a decade of prodigious filmmaking, but now that the tide is out we can see who was swimming naked. At the time of its release, "The Lover" was considered a sophisticated big-budget foreign film based on the semi-fictional memoir of screenwriter Marguerite Duras. Today it's akin to a poor-man's Merchant-Ivory picture, oozing with the requisite pomp and bustle of a period drama, yet lacking in any sense of bohemian worldliness or romantic warmth. Put another way, it's a love story without any heart.
Director Jean-Jacques Annaud ("Seven Years in Tibet," "Enemy at the Gates") attempted to make the film with Duras herself, but creative differences led him away from her and to Polanski confidante Gérard Brach, who made the unscrupulous details of the novel somewhat more palatable to western tastes. Casting was just as challenging, and it wasn't until Annaud's wife spotted Jane March is a teen fashion magazine that the role of The Young Girl was filled. Tony Leung is her Chinese Man, and Annaud's screenplay attempts to leverage itself on the controversies of the age and racial differences between these two characters; March plays a 15 year-old, while Leung is in his thirties. Depictions of sexual congress between them was considered May-December romance in 1992, and would probably land the crew in jail in 2022.
The story is unambiguously simple. The Young Girl is crossing the Mekong River by ferry in French Indochina in 1929. A super wealthy aristocratic Chinese Man spies her from the backseat of his 1932 Buick Special 90 (anachronisms abound). One thing leads to another, starting with conversation in the back seat before moving on to a light round of older Chinese guy stalking gawky Young Girl outside her school, and ending with them naked together and rolling around in the sheets. Their racial differences are emphasized, as both cultures roundly rejected interracial unions at the time, while the sugar-daddy bit was ironically less statutory, although it would have been more readily accepted had their races been reversed. The Girl's alcoholic mother and degenerate brother conspire to abort her future in Vietnam by using Chinese Man's money to send her "home" to France, while his family intends to see him off in a traditional arranged marriage. Somewhere amid these obstacles lies their romance.
In a better movie, this romance would be tender. Think of the knowing looks between Kevin Costner's John Dunbar and Mary McDonnell's Christine Gunther in "Dances with Wolves." Recall the quietly charming buildup of amorous tension between Emma Thompson's Elinor Dashwood and Hugh Grant's Edward Ferrars in Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility." These films understand the value of touch by putting a premium on its absence. "The Lover" makes the mistake of showing unending rivers of bodies touching, right to the very edge of pornography. This is forgivable if there are souls beneath the flesh, but Annaud fails to render The Young Girl and The Chinese Man as real people. Their dialogue is always stilted, as if it's searching for meaning in every word, and thus their interactions are never convincing.
I nearly gave the movie two stars, but there is one brief scene near the end that brought tears to my eyes, which after an hour and forty minutes of monotony felt like cognitive dissonance, especially for someone who never cries at the movies. It's one of those haunting shots that musters up enough emotional charge using nothing more than imagery, the mark of what Hitchcock called "pure cinema." That this moment is inexorably woven into the story by neatly tying itself to its beginning happens not by accident, but by design, like matching flecks of vermillion brightness on opposite ends of a muddy Rothko colorfield.
You will need to see if for yourself to know if it'll have a similar effect on you.
Some art is like that, I guess.
--- Bill Fontaine
