The Lover (1992) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp (C) 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A test case for why there will be no follow-up to LAST TANGO IN PARIS.
THE LOVER is a deeply confused movie that does not know what it wants to do, and what it does do, it doesn't understand. We don't see what's critical to the story, and everything we do see feels like it's from another, more interesting movie. It's a superficially pretty film that, if made by an American director, might have just been rendered as soft-core porn and left at that, gaining the benefit of unpretentiousness.
Marguerite Duras wrote the allegedly autobiographical novel from which the movie is drawn, but it might as well have been Xaviera Hollander, from the total lack of depth of character that the movie displays. The story is simple, the stuff of anonymous highbrow porn: Two strangers who make a pact not to know too much about each other, separated by barriers of culture and class, have piles of sex.
The woman of the two is played by Jane March, a young French girl living in Indochina. The man is Tony Leung, a rich Chinese fellow who is almost twice as old as she is. Their meeting is rendered in the same kind of non-verbal way as in (better) movies like DAMAGE: they see each other, and somehow, they are thunderstruck. They rent a room in the Chinese quarter and, like I said before, have piles of sex.
What's infuriating about the movie is that it does not confront any of this on its own terms. LAST TANGO IN PARIS and DAMAGE had the nerve to do that; so did Fassbinder's searing ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL. THE LOVER winds up splitting into two schizophrenic halves. In one, the young girl hates school, has to deal with her priggish parents, has a semi-sexual relationship with another (female) classmate, etc. In the other, the two lovers have piles of sex. If I sound like I'm being repetitious, then perhaps you're getting the point. The movie quickly settles into a pattern: sex, strained dialogue, the girl's hateful life, more sex. Soon we're checking to see if our watches have stopped.
Worse, the first half of the movie is far more fierce and interesting than the second half. I wanted to know more about her classmate, with whom she has several spellbinding scenes. I wanted to see more about how she dealt with her mother and father. And -- but I hate to say this because it's asking too much from a movie like this -- I wanted to know about what these two lovers were really thinking, feeling, trying to find out about each other when they rented that little room. The movie has no ideas about erotic attraction between people, just prettiness: it's a vapid intellectual's version of a PENTHOUSE centerspread.
The movie's conclusion is enraging, because it does not have one. It simply terminates the main story, and then tacks on a prefab conclusion that ALSO terminates prematurely. This is a movie about deep human enigmas that's made by total babes in the woods.
One-half out of four bamboo screens.
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