The Lover, originally released in France as L'Amant, is a 1992 drama film produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Based on the semi-autobiographical 1984 novel by Marguerite Duras, the film details the illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 French Indochina. In the screenplay written by Annaud and Gérard Brach, the girl's age is changed from 15½ to 18 and is portrayed by actress Jane March, who turned eighteen shortly after filming began.
Production began in 1989, with filming commencing in 1991. The film made its theatrical debut on 22 January 1992, with an English release in the United Kingdom in June and in the United States in October of the same year. The film won the Motion Picture Sound Editors's 1993 Golden Reel award for "Best Sound Editing — Foreign Feature" and the 1993 César Award for Best Music Written for a Film. It received mostly negative reviews from American critics.
Plot
The primary characters are known only as The Young Girl and The Chinese Man. The daughter of bitter, fearful, poverty-stricken colonials, she is a pretty waif who likes to wear an old silk dress and a man's fedora and paint her lips bright red when out of her mother's sight. She hates everything about her existence — her teachers, her fellow students, and most of all her depraved, dysfunctional family. The son of a Chinese businessman whose fortune was made in real estate, he recently has returned from Paris after dropping out of school. He has the look but lacks the self-assurance of the playboy he fancies himself to be, and he is mesmerized the first time he sees her standing by the rail on a crowded ferry crossing the Mekong River.
He offers her a ride to Saigon in his chauffeur-driven limousine and she accepts, although the two barely speak during the drive. The Girl gives her age at the beginning of the film as 15½, but lies to the The Chinese Man by stating that she is 17. The following day, he waits for her outside her boarding school, and the two go to the room he rents for entertaining mistresses in the seedy Chinese quarter, where they make love. Afterward she confesses she doesn't care for Chinese people, and he retaliates by telling her he couldn't marry her because she no longer is a virgin. Thus beguns a tempestuous affair both know won't last. She is scheduled to return to Paris. He is expected to engage in an arranged marriage with a Chinese heiress. Aware of the limited time they have together, they fall into a relationship in which they shed all responsibilities that come with commitment.
Cast
- Jane March as The Young Girl
- Tony Leung Ka Fai as The Chinese Man
- Frédérique Meininger as The Mother
- Arnaud Giovaninetti as The Elder Brother
- Melvil Poupaud as The Younger Brother
- Lisa Faulkner as Helene Lagonelle
- Xiem Mang as The Chinaman's Father
- Philippe Le Dem as The French Teacher
- Ann Schaufuss as Anne-Marie Stretter
Production
While adapting the Marguerite Duras novel into the film's screenplay, director Jean-Jacques Annaud and fellow writer Gérard Brach changed the age of "The Girl" from 15½ to 18, but tried to maintain the original structure and literary tone of the original novel.[1] As with the Duras novel, none of the characters use names and are referred to in the credits as "The Girl" and "The Man".[1] To find the actress who would play the girl, Annaud advertised in multiple cities in the United States and the United Kingdom, visited drama schools, and watched television. However, it was his wife who came upon 16-year-old British model Jane March's photograph in a teen fashion magazine and brought her to his attention.[2] When filming began 14 January 1991, March was two months away from turning 18.[3]
Annaud first flew to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam in 1989 to view the original novel's setting, but was greatly disappointed at the state of the country.[4] In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he stated that "best colonial hotel" offered "rats as big as this running through the corridors, spiders everywhere, and no air conditioning, of course. When we tried to use the sink, three drops of brown water--I presume from the Red River--came out of the faucet."[4] He initially decided against filming in the country, and began scouting locations in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, all countries that have been used as settings to represent Vietnam in other Western films.[4] A year later, he returned to his original choice, feeling no other country could truly represent the "tired museum".[4] According to Annaud and MGM studio, it was the first Western film to be shot in the country since the reunification of the country in 1975.[4][5] The government welcomed the crew, providing them with a governmental helicopter for use during filming.[4] However, the filmmakers were required to clear all production storyboards with officials before they could be filmed, and an official remained on set at all times.[4] All of the film's sexual scenes had to be shot in Paris as they could not be filmed on location.[4] It took 135 days to complete filming, and due to the importation costs of shooting in Vietnam, the film cost $30 million to produce.[2][4][6][7]
Release
After its completion, the film was first screened in Saigon where it was well received by the "morally minded" guests.[4] The Lover debuted theatrically in France on 22 January 1992. Its first English release came in the United Kingdom 19 June 1992. The film was licensed for release in the United States by MGM Studios, but for its theatrical debut, it first had to get past opposition by the Motion Picture Association of America. The organization gave the original film an MPAA rating of NC-17. MGM appealed after cutting three minutes of the film. Coupled with pleases from Annaud, MGM, and a sex educator who argued that the cut version was no more illicit than the 1992 sexual thriller Basic Instinct, the film's rating was changed to R.[4] It hit American theaters on 30 October 1992. The uncut version of the film was released to Region 1 DVD on 11 December 2001 with audio tracks in English and French and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Reception
The Lover grossed $4,899,194 in box office receipts in the United States.[8] It was nominated for the 1992 Academy Award for Best Cinematography[9] and won the 1993 Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel award for "Best Sound Editing — Foreign Feature".[10] At the 1993 César Awards in France, it was nominated for seven awards, winning in the category of "Meilleure musique écrite pour un film" (lit. "Best music written for a film") for Gabriel Yared's score.[11]
The film received mostly negative reviews from American critics. On the aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, it has a "freshness" rating of 33%, based on 15 critical reviews.[12] Vincent Canby of the New York Times, however, praised the film, calling it "something of a triumph" and a "tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental" film that was "produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center." He also complimented the performances of Tony Leung and Jane March, noting she is "wonderful" and a "nymphet beauty" in her film debut.[1]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times compared the film to Emmanuelle or the Playboy and Penthouse erotic videos, "in which beautiful actors and elegant photography provide a soft-core sensuality. As an entry in that genre, The Lover is more than capable, and the movie is likely to have a long life on video as the sort of sexy entertainment that arouses but does not embarrass." He continued, "Is The Lover any good as a serious film? Not really. Annaud and his collaborators have got all of the physical details just right, but there is a failure of the imagination here; we do not sense the presence of real people behind the attractive facades of the two main actors." [13]
Desson Howe of the Washington Post observed, "Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments . . . But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, Lover never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities." [14]
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded the film C, calling it "one more movie that titillates us with the prospect of taking sex seriously and then dampens our interest by taking it too seriously. Why do so many filmmakers insist on staging erotic encounters as if they were some sort of hushed religious ritual? The answer, of course, is that they're trying to dignify sex. But sex isn't dignified — it's messy and playful and abandoned. In The Lover, director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us the sweating and writhing without the spontaneity and surprise." [15]
In the United Kingdom, Channel 4 noted "the nameless characters bring to mind Last Tango's search for identity through passion, and there's a shade of Ai No Corrida's intensity. But there is none of the substance that made those two films such landmarks of their genre, and while March and Leung are an attractive pair, the glossy look and aloof direction of the film leaves you cold." [16] The critic for Time Out London thought its "sombre quality dignifies an otherwise shoddily directed movie" that is "basically a melancholic piece about the remembrance of times, places and passions lost." He felt the role of the Young Girl was "altogether too complex for the inexperienced March to do more than simply embody." [17]
References
- ^ a b c Canby, Vincent (30 October 1992). "The Lover (1992)". New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?_r=2&res=9E0CE4DB1F30F933A05753C1A964958260. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
- ^ a b Garey, Juliann (1992-11-06). "Naked Came the Stranger". Entertainment Weekly. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,312270,00.html. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
- ^ "Jane March". Variety Profiles. http://www.variety.com/profiles/people/main/32446/Jane%20March.html?dataSet=1. Retrieved 2009-06-01.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Galbraith, Jane (1992-10-30). "Steam From Saigon - Interview - Forget the Sex, Director Says--How About Those Hot Locations?". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-30/entertainment/ca-821_1_hot-locations. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
- ^ Do, Tess; Tarr, Carrie (March 13, 2008). "Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City: The Lover/L’Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung cu and Bargirls/Gái nhay". Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29 (1): 55-67. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00319.x. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119398537/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.
- ^ "L'Amant" (in French). Bibliothèque du film, under "Tournage". http://cinema.encyclopedie.films.bifi.fr/index.php?pk=46245. Retrieved 2009-06-01.
- ^ "L'Amant - Infos tournage" (in French). Toutlecine.com. http://www.toutlecine.com/film/tournage/0001/00012953-l-amant.html/. Retrieved 2009-06-01.
- ^ "The Lover". Box Office Mojo. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lover.htm. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
- ^ "Academy Awards Database: The Lover". Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. http://awardsdatabase.oscars.org/ampas_awards/BasicSearch?action=searchLink&displayType=3&BSFilmID=38085. Retrieved 2009-06-01.
- ^ "Weekend Awards Provide Warm-up for Oscars". Daily News of Los Angeles. 23 March 1993.
- ^ "César 1993" (in French). CinEmotions.com. Intermediance Solutions. http://www.cinemotions.com/modules/Awards/Award_detail/Cesar/1993/18. Retrieved 2009-06-01.
- ^ "The Lover". Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lover/. Retrieved 2009-06-02.
- ^ Chicago Sun-Times review
- ^ Washington Post review
- ^ Entertainment Weekly review
- ^ Channel 4 review
- ^ Time Out London review
External links
