INDOCHINE
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
There have been several films in the past that dealt with French colonization. ALGIERS is perhaps the finest example.
INDOCHINE starts slowly, as if it were merely the story of a French woman, Ms. Devries (Catherine Deneuve), whose father and she own a rubber plantation in VietNam, and who falls in love with a younger man (Vincent Perez), a French naval officer. She is the mother of an Asian daughter (Linh Dan Pham) whom she adopted when the child lost her parents.
But the film suddenly picks up its pace when it turns political, when it shows how the French treated the Indo-Chinese as slaves, separating families (as was done in the U.S. prior to our Civil War), how people were weighed and examined like cattle before being sold into bondage. Clearly, the VietNamese had enough grievances to overthrow the French and drive them out.
The story takes another turn when the young man leaves Ms. Devries when her daughter falls in love with him. But the main story is the routing of the French, the love stories being merely the vehicle to tell the greater story of the war.
An exciting film. . . and a foreshadowing of what we encountered when we fell into the VietNam trap from which the French had finally extricted themselves.
In French with English subtitles.
Directed by Regis Wargnier
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Ben Hoffman
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