The Lover

Starring Jane March and Tony Leung. Rated restricted.

Now playing at Vancouver Centre

The Lover tended to polarize French critical opinion in a rather interesting way. While all but the most trivial journals freely conceded the film was trash, a number of serious reviewers found in its very trashiness a vitality and fascination that the more rigorous cinema of the 1990s seemed to lack.

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails at the North American box office, Jean-Jacques Annaud's latest movie seems unlikely to generate much passionate local debate. For one thing, France's most successful commercial director is not that well-known over here. His major European successes (The Bear, Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose) were not the mega-hits in North America they were everywhere else. Consequently, there is little reason for English-speaking critics to either lionize this director or cut him down to size.

Ironically, the charge most often voiced against Annaud is probably the least valid. For auteurist critics, he is the ultimate hack, a celluloid whore who would happily turn his hand to anything, so long as it sold.

And yet, when watching The Lover, viewers will probably be struck by how similar the film is to all of Annaud's previous work, stretching back to Black and White in Colour. Once again, pretty pictures (one can't really say beautiful cinematography, since the latter term implies a narrative command that the film-maker has yet to achieve) are forced to compensate for inadequate acting and dialogue. Once again, the director is so detached from his material that an unfluctuating rhythm of amiable tedium is obtained.

Of course, the controversy that once enveloped The Lover has long since evaporated. Rumours that the film contained hard-core sex scenes were subsequently disproved. Marguerite Duras, the author of the bestselling semi-memoir on which the film was based, at first disparaged the movie then reluctantly gave it her seal of approval. Since The Lover has been dubbed into English (no great tragedy this, since neither of the motion picture's two stars are native francophones), it lacks even the stubborn courage of literate subtitles.

If nothing else, the film stands out as a monument to the problems inherent in cinematic translation. When spoken aloud in English by voice-over narrator Jeanne Moreau, Duras's aphoristic prose sounds pompous and pretentious. Her autobiographical minimalism (with the possible exception of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Duras is the only French artist whose contributions to the French New Novel are equalled by her gifts to the Nouvelle Vague) is decidedly ill-served by screen adapter Gerard Brach.

On the other hand, The Lover is not exactly chock-a-block with plot. The original story describes the author's precocious affair with a slightly older Chinese businessman (no doubt for the benefit of North American audiences, their ages have been changed to 18 and 32 from 15 and 25) in the Indochina of the late 1920s. Since French colonial rule is still firmly in place, there's no real chance of their liaison going anywhere, so the young lovers derive such transgressive pleasures as they can from their transitory union.

In any event, social context takes second place to long, lingering shots of (semi-nude) Tony Leung making sweaty, Vaseline-lensed love to (completely nude) Jane March. When not looking at handsome skin, one's eyes are directed towards picturesque landscape (usually photographed from inside the "Chinese Man's" chauffeur-driven limousine or from the bow of some river-crossing ferry) or equally scenic townscape.

So relentless is this eyeball caress, in fact, one can't help wondering if the director didn't want to make a '60s style "date movie" for the courting couples of the '90s.

So far as the acting is concerned, Tony Leung is okay while Jane March is literally wretched (aside from its obvious prurient potential, the actress's frequent nudity helps to distract the audience from the painful limitations of her facial expressions).

The French are making a lot of movies about their colonial experience in Indochina right now (just as the British were in the mid-1980s). Let's hope the other examples of this trend are more substantial.

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