THE LOVER
With Jane March and Tony Leung.
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Yet if films about the relationships between white women and black men touch a raw nerve, so do films dealing with relationships between white women and Asian men. But here the context shifts to the centuries-old power struggle between imperialists and the colonized. The vanquished Asians were supposed to be meek, obedient, and pitiable–unworthy of the society of whites. More than 70 years ago D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms milked pathos out of the furtive liaison on the fringe of London’s Chinatown between a frail immigrant and a much-abused Cockney waif. To Griffith’s credit, he contrasted the gentleness of the Chinese man with the brutality of the waif’s father and turned the lovers’ plight into a poetical plea for tolerance.
As far as I know, The Lover is the first major commercial film in years to make this particular “forbidden love” its focus–though director Jean-Jacques Annaud has coyly insisted in interviews that it’s about “cross-cultural romance.” Perhaps the economic success of East Asian countries, in evening the political balance of power between East and West, has dulled the stigma. But in Duras’ novel the taboo is pivotal in the sexual power game between a wealthy Chinese man and a pubescent French girl.
Annaud was an odd choice to adapt The Lover. (The producers apparently thought Duras was too old and esoteric for the high-budget project.) A literal-minded director with an eye for stunning images, Annaud is not one for subtlety and psychological observation–at best he’s a highbrow Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction) whose craftiness at literary adaptation was proved by the box-office success of his 1986 film The Name of the Rose. Undoubtedly on the minds of The Lover’s producers was Annaud’s track record with location shoots (for the sake of authenticity, The Lover was to be shot largely in Vietnam–the first Western production to be filmed there): he had trekked to Africa for Black and White in Color, turned parts of Spain into a prehistoric landscape for Quest for Fire, and climbed the Alps for The Bear.
