SnoopyStyle In French colonial Indochina, a French girl (Jane March) has two older brothers, Pierre and Paul. Pierre is their mother's favorite despite being a thief and a bully. They're in fear of him. She is repatriating him to France after stealing from an opium den. The family is running out of money for him to steal. On a Mekong river crossing, the girl meets a rich jobless globetrotting playboy Chinaman (Tony Ka Fai Leung). She tells him that she's 17 despite being only 15 and a half. He gives her a ride to her boarding school and starts an erotic affair. Her friend Helene Lagonelle is the only other white girl in the school.This is a solid example of the sub-genre of exotic erotica. It's got beautiful naked people but it's not quite overt softcore porn. It's more cinematic than the classic Emmanuelle or other pornographic B-movies. The exotic locations look beautiful. It is visually stunning. The acting is competent. These are actual actors. On the other hand, the story is paper thin. The plot isn't much to talk about but that may be besides the point.

rajah524-3 I think I was about 23 -- freshly returned from Vietnam -- when it began to dawn on me that the culture that includes most Americans is horribly crippled.(At our best, we seem trapped in a fog of bewilderment. At our worst, we are certain we know what is best for everyone. Yet we dine on a steady diet of "love" the French would swear was "rage.") I came back from what had become quite normal to me to the place I'd grown up, and found it anything -but- normal. That sense of disconnection only lasted for a time. I wasn't conscious enough then to recognize that the undoing of my disenchantment was simply a matter of becoming a part of that crippled culture again.But when I see films like this, like Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," like Wertmuller's "Swept Away," like Fontaine's "Nathalie," I know once again what it is like to know what I really -feel- about life. I know who and what I am for a bit. I am re-engaged with what matters.

simona gianotti No doubt that the central element dominating The lover is eroticism. When I first saw this movie I was a little more than a girl, and I was simply but intensively overwhelmed by the high erotic quality of those encounters between a young girl, a little younger than me and a young Chinese man, being emotional and physical involvement mixed up with a sense of mental confusion: I wondered and was not able to figure out whether this story was just sex, or if any trace of feeling or spirit was to be found in it. I have seen it again recently and being now a young woman, older age makes you look at things with a different and more mature eye and to find a meaning: the young girl doesn't ask herself too much, just because her young age allows her not to think, she disregards the rational and emotional complications of love, she is endowed with that powerful mix of innocence and longing for experience which lead her just to enjoy the full pleasure and sensual side of love, without understanding if their's a soul, or simply a single feeling inside that penetrating body. The young man is, on the contrary, experienced enough to know perfectly what he is searching very clearly, and he is honest since from the beginning, admitting his life is based on pleasure. We are not told what will remain of these encounters, consumed in a shabby garconniere, as everyday life goes on outside, but I believe that they were so deeply lived and felt, that their future life will always keep signs within their souls. Indeed, in the novel, in the end we find the young man who comes to Paris many years later and calls her revealing that he has never stopped loving her and he would love her until death.What I understood and rationalized is the real quality of those love scenes which once appeared to me as too strong, too obscene, too strong, even embarrassing to watch. What Marguerite Duras and Jean Jacques Annaud wanted to render was physical pleasure in its purest form: her body, in between that of a girl and that of a woman, his glabrous body with his smooth skin resembling a statue, make their sexual encounters truly transcend reality. Everything is physical but but not carnal, body, not flesh, explicit but at the same time never indulging in vulgar detail, displaying but concealing at the same time, a celebration of sexual pleasure and attraction at its best, pleasure taken and given always in the shade, pleasure never shouted, but softly accompanied by evocative music and sublime photography. A movie aimed at an adult audience, however, I admit that some of that overwhelming involvement experienced as a girl, has remained and is still able to stir strong emotions.

akkoziol I saw the film at an art house in the early 90s and loved it. I later saw the unrated cut on laser-disc and the added footage did flesh out (no pun intended) a lot of the scenes. This film is so beautifully shot and much attention to detail is given so as to envelop the viewer in colonial Vietnam during the hot summer months. I wish it would have gotten a 5.1 treatment as the ambient audio tracks on this are great. The story is, of course, based on the Duras book of the same name but is perhaps a bit more tame. Great interplay between the two characters makes this movie great and painful to watch as the story plays out. Certainly not for the younger set (though it seems the younger set watches this as it is practically soft-porn at times), it's very erotic, often arousing, and sadly painful but beautiful.