The Lover
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Movie Reviews of The Lover
Movie Review: A Classic Sensuous, Alluring and Enduring Love Story!
Summary: 5 Stars
You will NOT be disappointed with this movie! As required reading for upper division coursework at the University of the Pacific, I was introduced to several outstanding novels that have been made into excellent thought and soul provoking movies. This movie was one of them. I am particularly UNinterested in "love stories", "romance" or "erotica" per se, but this movie has original, cultural and sensual nuances that CANNOT be denied with such viewing pleasure.
There is a deeper wisdom than projected on the surface of this movie. You will probably have to see it more than once to catch many subtleties that might be overlooked in the first viewing, as this movie has many inside cultural aspects that may not be understood by the "average moviegoer". The regional and cultural scenery also adds an intense mystique to the movie, as well as educated those less experienced about this culture and historical era.
I HIGHLY recommend this movie as it will surely surprise you in its originality and deep connections to a latent part of self, not always discovered in youth, but as can also be discovered at ANY stage of life, as is so often overlooked, yet well portrayed by the male leading character, played by the HOT actor Tony Leung Ka Fai. Jane March plays such an overt sensual character that the sensuality Leung brings to the screen, is more subtle, but just as intense.
Movie Review: Tender and near sublime
Summary: 5 Stars
The beauty of this film and its heartbreaking romance lie in the unspoken, between the acrid disavowals of love, in the bitter context of colonial racial, socio-economic, and gender relations. Tony Leung and Jane March superbly portray the tensions existing within the multiple layers of colonial relations - the emasculation of the Chinaman vis a vis the privilege of the girl's whiteness playing out along with the shame and barbarity of the girl's poverty vis a vis the civility and access of his Chinese (not even native) affluence. Ultimately, the schism wrought by the sociocultural constraints of their disparate backgrounds is what tears them asunder or rather dooms their romance from the beginning.
What Annaud does brilliantly is to portray the lovers' yearning without giving voice to it overtly. He depicts it through a series of disavowals, through the wounds they inflict on each other, and allows the viewer to fill in that which cannot be uttered.
As for the graphic portrayals of sex, I am usually the first to decry graphic sex scenes. However, in this film, the sex scenes again plays out the dynamics of the characters as a part of the larger colonial relations. The tenderness of this film and of its romance lie within the beautifully cinematographed sex scenes as well as in the violence and poignancy that exists throughout rest of the film.
Movie Review: The Movie I cannot stop loving
Summary: 5 Stars
As time goes by, I still love both Marguerite Duras's novel The Lover and the movie which is deliberately adapted by Jean-Jacques Annuad and perfectly acted by Jane March and Tony Leung Ka Fai. If you experience this love in your life, you will be a great writer. "to write, that's what I see beyond the moment in that great desert under the features of which I see the extent of my life......"
This is a wonderful movie. When Duras herself watched the movie, she said, "It is wonderful". The cinematography is gorgeous and the story is heartbreaking. When the boat back to France uttered its first farewell, she'd swept without showing her tears. Suddenly, her eyes lit up and music on, she saw his big black car "he was there. That was him in the back." Then, "she was leaning on the rails, like the first time on the ferry". "She know he was watching her. She was watching him, too. She couldn't see him any more but she still looked toward the shape of the black car." "She wasn't sure she hadn't loved him with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the story like water in sand......"
I cannot stop loving the movie. It is always there, vividly in my memory, word by word, scene by scene, over and over again...
Movie Review: A beautiful love story, still.
Summary: 5 Stars
Watched this movie when I was young, now 10 years later, much older and more experienced, it still holds my heart.
The love that can be called "true love" is the love that you cannot and must not have.
So many have claimed this film is soft porn etc., and they need to have their soul cleaned. The "porno" parts are so beautifully presented and so interwoven into the storyline, you only see its beauty.
The music of the movie flows through out. If you have seen some old movie, ie, the legendary "Terminator", you would hear those awful music as if they were from some bad porno movies. In "The Lover", the music, the scenery, the settings are so beautifully done, even viewed so many years later, it feels only better. And that is what should be called "classic".
The most touching moment for me is, in his car, when the man reach over and touched her little finger... That moment is the moment when the boundaries between man and woman, Asian and white (back then it's a huge issue), and rich and poor were being crossed.
That moment beats any of those in the Academy Awarded films like Titanic.
Movie Review: The Lover...
Summary: 5 Stars
I first saw this 'foreign' movie back in the early nineties in a small theatre in Orange County. What had attracted me to it was it was a story of a 'forbidden' affair. What I took from the movie was the following: Two people met, fell in love (though they tried not to show it), and then were 'forced' apart due to their own, unfortunate (marriage for him, repatriation to France for her) circumstances. We saw the depth of his pain before his marriage to the Chinese girl. We saw the depth of her pain when she was on the ship back to France. Love like that, really, truly comes along once in a lifetime for most people - some people never find it! An excellent movie. Five Stars!
(Updated 07-15-2006: After 13 years of watching "The Lover" based on Marguerite Dumas's non-fictional account of her affair with an gentleman of Asian extraction, I have finally found the music to which our young French girl surrends her tears (at the end of the movie!) The music, is Chopin's Waltz in B Minor, Opus 69, No. 2!! Ashkenazy's rendition is just icing on the cake!! Five stars!!)