... and there's a lot of that about because Vietnam WAS Indochina at the time this movie deals with which is primarily the 1930s. Eliane Devries (Catherine Deneuve) has both a daughter and a son yet has never given birth which is maybe a metaphor for France 'adopting' Indochina. Like Heart Of Darkness the film employs a frame-narrator in the shape of Deneuve who begins by telling her story to Camille (Linh Dan Pham) whose parents have just been killed and because they were Eliane's best friends she has adopted Camille - who comes with a dowry of her parent's land which swell the size of Eliane's rubber plantation - and both raises and loves her as her own. Devries is a chic Frenchwoman who, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, has forsaken the chic, culture and civilisation of France for a superficially beautiful yet ultimately harsh land that's not unlike the ante-bellum South without the Mississippi. When a young naval officer, Jean-Baptiste (Vincent Perez) appears on the scene the inevitable happens and May and December have their mayfly moment. Jean-Baptiste was, of course, the name of the mime artist in Les Enfants du Paradis and is well chosen given that Perez, who has all the charisma of the Black Hole of Calcutta on a bad day, might just as well be miming for all the animation he brings to his lines. Equally inevitably Camille falls in love with him and when Deneuve has him transferred to a remote outpost Camille follows him and contrives to kill one of his colleagues putting them both on the run. All this is played out against the political unrest that is always a by-product of colonialism. In turn Camille has a child by Jean-Baptiste; he is killed, she becomes something of a Vietnamese La Passionara and Deneuve winds up holding the baby and it is he, now a grown man, to whom Deneuve is narrating the story in 1954 as Indochina became Vietnam. Weighing in at two and a half hours it requires stamina but in addition to Deneuve both Jean Yanne and Dominique Blanc are on hand and against all the odds it does keep you watching.
Review of Indochine
