Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"The Lover" is a gorgeously sensuous and erotic film about a young girl's awakening to love and her own sexuality. Whover categorized this movie as soft porn needs to wash his or her mind out with Lysol. It is, quite simply, a love story. Jane March plays "the young girl", a French adolescent in colonial Vietnam living with her widowed mother and two brothers. Her mother barely makes ends meet by teaching, her younger brother, with whom she has a relationship both protective and erotic, is weak and passive, and her older brother is brutally antisocial, stealing the family's few funds to support his opium habit and bullying his younger siblings through violence. The girl attends a lycée in Saigon where she and her friend are the only Caucasian pupils. On a trip from her home back to school she meets "the Chinaman" played by Tony Leung, and their encounter sets off sparks. Leung is the son of a rich overseas Chinese, engaged to marry the Chinese girl picked out by his father, who spends his own days in an opium haze; his feelings for the young girl are at first purely sexual but ripen into a love so deep it confuses and frightens him. It's a love that is doomed from the start. His father will not hear of him marrying a non-Chinese, and her family, although the equivalent of white trash, still considers themselves better than the Asians they live among. When the word of her affair with the Chinaman gets out, she becomes an outcast among her schoolmates. The young girl tries to cope with the social and emotional conflicts by convincing herself and telling him that she doesn't love him; he knows she's kidding herself and so do we, and toward the movie's end, when she has lost him forever through his marriage to the woman chosen for him by his father and her own repatriation to France, she can't hide from herself the fact that she is deeply in love with him. Jane March is incredible in the role of the young girl; she brings out all her character's innocence, sexuality and adolescent confusion. Tony Leung is just right as the pampered son of a rich family who is hamstrung by the mores and traditions of his family and society; and Frederique Meininger is especially effective as the mother, who dotes on her worthless older son (the more venal she knows he is, the more she dotes on him, helpless to deal with the reality of what he is, and worse, what he will become), and condemns her daughter's relationship with a Chinese on the one hand while she has no problem taking her daughter's lover's money on the other. The cinematography is beautiful and conveys all the heat and languor of colonial Vietnam. This is no film for children; the sex scenes are as explicit as can be shown in any film not rated X. At the film's end (Jeanne Moreau does an excellent voice-over throughout the movie), when the Chinaman after decades of silence telephones the girl who is now a middle-aged woman and tells her he has never forgotten her and will love her until death, we realize how strong was the love between these two. It's a beautiful film of two people who were just right, even while they were all wrong, for each other. Judy Lind