But Annaud demonstrates dexterity in his treatment of the subject.
Like Lolita, The Lover too has numerous sexual encounters between the girl and the Chinaman – his taking of her virginity, her bursting sexuality to the way she asserts herself in bed, are quite erotic. They never believed that she could have an affair with the man. They accept the relationship because the man gives the girl money. To pass it off as a casual friendship he even takes her family out for dinner where her mother and her brothers pounce on the food and get drunk, but they never speak to him.
Interestingly, the girl’s family gets furious when ‘The Chainaman’ drops her home for the first time. Yet the end is not what either of them anticipated. The awareness of the limited duration of their relationship seems to relieve them of any awkward commitments. He tells her that even he couldn’t marry her now as it is against their custom to marry a girl who is not a virgin. Afterward she casually blurts out that she doesn’t much like the Chinese. In the room she is sweet to the man when they make love. We also come to know about the class conflicts and social inequalities of that time. From the beginning both of them know it is not meant to last. The girl is inexperienced but is absolutely focused, approaching her first sexual relationship with an obvious curiosity that both fascinates and disturbs the man.
When she comes out, she walks directly to the car and they go to the room in the Saigon’s Chinese quarter.įor the girl it was just an escape from her poverty-stricken life, her abusive mother and elder brother. The next day he waits for her in the street by her school. They scarcely speak in the car during the drive, but their hands touch. She accepts his invitation of a ride in his chauffeur-driven sedan, and sparks fly. She is awestruck by his wealth, his expensive suit and new car. He is immediately struck by her beauty and makes advances on her. The film is told from the perspective of the girl, who meets ‘The Chinaman’ one day on a ferry to Saigon. The novel comes as a monologue written in a way that the characters are not even named. While Kubrick’s Lolita was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Annaud’s The Lover was chosen for Best Cinematography.īased on a novel by Marguerite Duras, which is a semi-autobiography about her early teen years, The Lover is set in the 1929’s French colonial Vietnam, where a 15-year-old French girl (Jane March) embarks on a reckless and forbidden romance with a 32-year-old wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka Fai). And I was not mistaken altogether.Īnother similarity being both the films were nominated at the Oscars. Lolita, is a twisted tale of passion, love and betrayal, where a middle-aged college professor Humbert becomes hopelessly obsessed with a 14-year-old girl. I was too curious to find out if the plot of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover had any resemblance to Lolita. The one thing she couldn’t give was her love” – It was the cover of the DVD and then the tagline of The Lover ( L’Amant in French) that caught my attention as I found a strange resemblance to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that was first adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and later by Adrian Lyne in 1997. “She gave her innocence, her passion, her body.
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