EST. 2009

October 18, 2012

That Early Indulgence










"VERY EARLY IN MY LIFE IT WAS TOO LATE." The first line alone was enough to get me hooked for the next hour and a half, being so delicious a line, I wish I had written it. What followed was not the most stellar, as many reviews assert, but The Lover was for me a welcome indulgence nonetheless; an uninterrupted visual feast, artfully alternating close flashes of skin with distant glances of French colonial Saigon. Scene after scene. Sigh after sight!

Based on Marguerite Duras' semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, The Lover recounts the author's adolescent affair with an older, wealthy Chinese man in 1920's Vietnam. The love scenes are long, and the rest of the movie, languid, but so stunning were Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai in the re-fashioned locale.

The Lover, 1992. Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.

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