更新时间:2018-05-20
他他 • 印度支那:[Film Review] Indochine (1992) 7.6/10
Régis Wargnier’s starkly impartial dissection of the declining colonial French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) in the 1930s, INDOCHINE is a perfervid melodrama that walks a fine line between rational self-examination and exotic exploitation, not to mention it chalked up Oscar’s BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM honor in 1993.
Catherine Deneuve plays Éliane, a wealthy French spinster and the proprietress of a rubber plantation in Indochina, whose well-off days is thrusted into an imbroglio when she and her Vietnamese adopted daughter Camille (a porcelain-like Linh Dan Pham in her film debut, taking the short end of the stick for some graphic nudity here), both fall in love with a handsome French sailor Jean-Bapiste (Pérez, an optimum dreamboat, smouldering with vigor and ardor), through quirks of fate, Camille kills a French officer when she barely reunites with a demoted Jean-Bapiste in the Dragon Islet, the pair soon starts their fugitive days with a Communist theater troupe, during which Camille bears him a son, Étienne, and theiranti-colonial feat turns into a local legend, sparks and fans endemic insurrections against the French dominion, before soon, an eternal separation gains on the star-crossed lovers, and the infant boy is returned to Éliane, who is gnawed by guilt and powerlessness, while Camille is being cooped up in prison, and the next time they meet is years later, yet nothing can be the same again, Camille is no longer the silver-spooned heiress, but a Communist fighter devotes herself to the noble cause of her country’s liberation. Sensing the colony’s numbered days are pending, Élaine sells the plantation and returns to France with Étienne.
Wargnier doesn’t pull punches in delineating the atrocity subjected to the downtrodden local paupers by the supercilious colonists, primarily through Camille's eyes during her headstrong pursuance of the man with whom she is smitten through an almost unilateral coup de foudre, driven by a resolution that is blindly impetuous, human beings are weighed and checked, and sold like animals, indeed, Camille's own quagmire is triggered by witnessing heinous murders of innocent people committed by those representing the privileged life as she knows it before, this is that hammer blow dashes her own illusion of the complacency under colonialism, which eventually leads viewers to feel slightly disappointing, that the film is not gutsy enough to brings her perspective into the cynosure.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean thatÉliane’s passive, conflicted realization is less impactful, she is the perfect specimen of French gentility and superiority, her slow disintegration with those around her can connect more with occidental audience (it is a French production after all), and Deneuve is superb to look at, not just in her usual enigmatic glamor and appeal (she still has it at the age of 49), but in those more poignant moments too, her Éliane holds sway whenever she goes, whoever she encounters, but there is a cauldron of inarticulate emotions shaping up her wholesome personality (beholding her reaction after receiving a slap in the face), that is what Deneuve is demanded to bring about, an Oscar nomination is quite a feather in her cup.
Visually and tonally speaking,Wargnier and his team give them all to recreate the nostalgic grandeur of a bygone era, and ascertain that they put their money where their mouth is, cosseting audience with scrumptious land/sea-scape panning shots and oriental exotica,Patrick Doyle’s orotund accompanying score is well conducive to its grand design, all in all, INDOCHINE is a behemoth of epic filmmaking that gingerly keeps cultural misappropriation and political contention at bay, but holds that faded memory in its heart.
companion pieces: Jean-Jacques Annaud’s THE LOVER (1992, 7.3/10); Wargnier’s EAST/WEST (1999, 7.5/10).
