The Lover (1992)

Touches You

Just perfect...

From my favorite movies..

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

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.

The Lover is a beautiful Art-house piece of film making, it's sex scenes, boldly frank and indeed sexy, where on top of that, are two captivating performances. It's hard to understand why people takes jabs at March's acting. Here, she so convincingly plays a French teenage girl, who, while traveling to boarding school in Saigon, meets an older wealthy Asian man, Leung, while boating down The Mekong River. She falls in love with him, and a passionate and forbidden affair in many ways, begins. Her character is not a happy person, neither is mother Mother or younger brother, due to the violent abuse they take from older brother. Things become worse when this relationship intensifies, fueling a much vented jealousy from older brother, a nasty piece of work. The photography and use of locations, is beautiful, which wonderfully sells it cinematically. The Lover was certainly something different for me back in 94, where sadly after Color Of Night, the underrated March disappeared off the radar, before making a slight return in that atrocious and little known Tarzan film with Casper Van Dien. The old women narration of March's character, by Jeanne Moreau, as reflecting back on this time, is perfectly cast. On the whole, The Lover is a movie experience to be experienced, which will have you pondering if love really exists, between these two or about what real love is, in general. Leung is the greatest Asian actor I've seen.

I saw 2046 and wanted something else that would take me to someplace other than the normal film construct. I looked through the indie film channels and found this on at 2 am, I recorded it to watch later. I read a review by Ebert and others which said the film was just like Emmanuelle and basically soft core porn. I wasn't too enthused by this, even though in highschool I liked the dubbed version of Emmanuelle so much that I bought a copy, it was so dream-like and ethereal. I looked at the director of The Lover and saw that he also directed 2 brothers about the two tigers and I liked that movie so I got more enticed. I do like to read a little backstory about a film before I see it, because I see them as a piece of creation/art and since I am spending an hour or two of my life observing this creation I would like to understand the context of it. The Lover is a good film, and a great imagination. Even though the original author experienced this same plot in real life, her imagination is the one that brought all these events into existence and viewed them from this narrative.I empathized with all the characters. The director and the original author depicted the pain of each person so well, usually without even saying a word. Just the role that each person plays and their conditions really draws you in. I could relate to the older brother and the film even made me reevaluate my own status in my family. When the young girl asks her mother why she treats her older brother so differently than the rest of the family the mother simply says 'I don't know'. That to me made this movie more true and legitimate than any other movie I have seen. Because everything else that happens in the movie relates to this trueness, and it all correlates so crystal clear. It is truly a sad movie. That is the core of what it sent to me. The poor young girl, the poor family. It was broken apart through events and the protective figurehead, the father, died. Now, they are left in squalor in Asia, and they are truly at a loss at how to reorient their lives. It is like watching headless animals wandering around with no understanding of what to do or how to fix it. And out of this, lack of center, the young girl enters her sexuality and her female skill of lethal seduction. The seduction that many young women use to give their feelings of insignificance something of power and control. This young girl draws a wealthy man to her by her skills and right from the start her animal nature tells her that she just caught what she was fishing for, in a sense. She has become significant. And she uses this role that she has created to elevate her to near or above her domineering older brother, and the squalor around her. She finds love, that she is missing from her mother and dead father. And she knows that the wealthy chinaman only wants her because he can't have her. From the start this chinaman showed that he was unworthy of compassion, by the way he told her he only wanted sex, and so she began her pantheress pursuit of his carcass. Her sense of guilt was non existent from his display of inconsiderateness for the thing he wanted to eat and use, and so the young girl's mind was free to take her prey down to lengths even she couldn't know she was capable of. And perhaps she was still more able to continue with it because of the hurt of her knowing that if she ever did fall for him his sense of need would die along with his inability to possess her. She liked how powerless he was, and to be honest, it is very enjoyable to be reassured that no matter how much money you have, you can never buy somebody's emotions.Though the last of the feeling that you get from this movie is the sadness that this poor girl had to sell herself for the emotions that she could have and should have gotten from her family and those around her, love, devotion and importance. I see it all the time, and it just makes the woman feel cheap and disillusioned with life and cold at how heartless and simple people can be.

In Jean-Jacques Annaud's flaccid soft-porn melodrama a young French girl is sexually awakened by a polite but torrid affair with a Chinese gentleman in colonial Southeast Asia. The film was adapted from the autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, but is actually a dimwitted cousin to 'Last Tango In Paris', with all the pretensions but none of the power of Bertolucci's film (the anonymous characters are identified only as 'the girl', 'the Chinese man', and so forth). The eroticism so vital to the story is further undermined by a script that might have been improved by subtitles (but not by much), and fatally crippled by two leads with little chemistry and even less depth. There's nothing about the vague, passive schoolgirl played by Jean March to suggest she could ever write like Duras, so it's hard to connect the often exquisite voice-over narration (read by Jeanne Moreau) with the empty sentiments coming out her mouth. Desperate publicists tried to drum up prurient interest by circulating rumors that the sex was genuine, but it's a moot point: the love scenes are no more provocative than a gymnastics exhibition, minus the dexterity and grace.