Good concept, poorly executed.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I have to start by saying this is my favorite movie of all times. I consider it both technically and as a storyline to be perfectly done. I have seen it dozens of times, it almost breaks my heart each time, the incredible acting, the story and the music are simply impeccable. Watching it several times made me understand the drama better, how She hides her love behind society's appearances, with her heart torn apart during a brilliant piece of music by Chopin. I don't think I have seen such expressive faces of actors before, each character so fantastically defined, you can practically read his/her thoughts on their faces. Lovely movie, a masterpiece in cinema indeed!

First I want to make it clear that even though this is a love story between a 30-something man and a 15-year-old school girl, the actress who plays the school girl was actually 18 during filming. However she did look 15, short and slender, and in some respects, the slope of her nose, the roundness of her face, reminded me of Leslie Caron when she was about that age. It is mostly set in French Viet Nam around 1930. British actress Jane March is The Young Girl, a 15-year-old French girl attending a boarding school. We first see her as she is taking the ferry to cross the wide river. She always wears a man's fedora, which looks very attractive on her. She wears a plain sack cloth dress and shoes with short, wide heels. She is at the rail, one foot on the deck, the other foot raised a bit and resting on a rail support.On the same ferry but in a car is Chinaman Tony Leung as The Chinaman. He is clearly wealthy, well-dressed and in a large black car, being driven by his driver. He sees the girl and goes to stand next to her. Not saying anything at first, he takes out his cigarette case, then offers one to the girl. She smiles and refuses, but they strike up a conversation.That is the beginning of an ongoing, clandestine love affair in his apartment in a slum of the city. The Chinaman is wealthy from birth, he does nothing for a living, just enjoys life and at this point he is enjoying this young girl. For her, it is her coming of age experience. She always claims she doesn't love him, but we suspect different. At one point she asks him if it is true, that a girl who has already lost her virginity cannot get married. He says that it is true. Her response is, that's fine because I don't really like the Chinese. It is not an erotic movie, more a tragic love story of two people who can never really be together. He has to follow his father's desires and marry the girl that has been arranged for him, a person he has never met. He professes his love for the school girl, but eventually she and her family leave to return to France. She becomes an author.

There are three interconnected themes in this film: an impossible love story in the colonial environment of pre-WWII Vietnam, relationships, and the constant crossing of boundaries and borders.I was rather disappointed while reading more than a dozen American reviews of this film penned by professional film critics. Only one reviewer seemed to be knowledgeable about the author and the position she occupies in the world's literature. These film critics concentrated somewhat obsessively on the sexual scenes, which take a total of nine minutes, or 8% of the film's duration. In my opinion, these movie reviews are the result of the genetic puritan attitude that prevails in the American society. Or maybe the reviewers were asleep during most of the film and only woke up for the "good parts?" "The Lover" has nothing to do with pornography. It depicts an intense passion, where, of course, sex plays an integral role. Annaud had no choice but to include this aspect of the story, and he did it in a meaningful and artistic way.The Chinaman has the advantage of being older, male, and wealthy, but he is Chinese -- and she is white. He has "lived it up" in Paris, where he had many liaisons. He is an expert at lovemaking. But he is also vulnerable as an only child, orphaned by his mother, dominated by his father. The Chinaman uses love and lovemaking to shore himself up against his insecurity. He is the archetypal romantic lover, talking to her of love, death, and eternity. His love, while passion-filled and pleasurable, is also an agony and physical torment. He is not at all the dominant, forceful seducer whom she craves. However, we must be careful to remember that we see his desire for the girl only through the narrator's subjective memories.By contrast, we know the feelings of the girl, even though time has certainly altered her memories. Right from the start, the girl refuses to use the language of love, denying the romantic concept of being his only love. The girl's desire for the Chinaman's body is firmly grounded in sensuality as well as in curiosity, but the first appeal she feels upon meeting him on the ferry is for his wealth, his luxurious car, his diamond ring. However, as she sails back to France, we learn that she comes to the realization that she may have loved him all along.As the affair progresses, other figures creep into the sexual imaginary: the young brother, the older brother, her friend Helen, and of course, her mother. There is a mother-daughter love/hate relationship. Duras depicts her mother as an unhappy, driven woman. She admires her mother's quality of perseverance, yet Duras cannot forgive her mother for the life of poverty and degradation, nor for her mother's excessive love for her oldest son and apparent failure to love her two younger children.And of course, Duras cannot forgive her mother's opposition to her becoming a writer. With her lovemaking, the girl experiences a triumphant sense of separation from and superiority over her mother. She is trying to eradicate the mother, to escape the stranglehold of their mutual hatred. The daughter's drive toward the lover, toward social disgrace and reputation, without understanding it herself, is to "punish" the mother.The girls' love affair with a Chinese man is also a giant step toward her liberation from the tyranny of her elder brother. It is somewhat ironical that the older brother's gambling, drug-addiction, and social marginalization are mirrored in the way her lover spends his days gambling and smoking opium.Finally, there is an undercurrent theme which runs throughout the film, which is that of boundaries and borders. The film opens with a ferry ride across the Mekong and ends with an ocean crossing, signaling the constant crossing of frontiers and borders: geographic of course, but also racial, cultural, and sexual. These are confronted and sometimes dissolved as the poor white girl of French parentage meets her wealthy Chinese lover in the Cholon, the ill- repute Chinese district of Saigon. She, a white girl, was raised among natives, almost as a native. He is a native who experienced the western culture and somehow longs for it.There is also the transitory period of the girl's adolescence, between what remains of her childhood, and the onset of her womanhood. On the ferry and on the steam liner, the girl wears a child's pigtails, but she is dressed in women's clothes. The gender roles are somewhat blurred, too: she wears a woman's dress, but also a man's hat, in a color that signifies femininity. The boarding school in Saigon is home mainly to the abandoned mixed-blood daughters of local women and French fathers. The girl has an intimate friendship with Helene Lagonelle, which is ambivalent and perhaps sexually charged. The girl is unable to treat the Chinaman with even a modicum of courtesy when she is with her brothers because he is Chinese, not white. In the public bus, she rides in front, separated from the locals, yet in her private home, she lived as a native. In the cocoon of the "garconnière," she is separated from the crowd on the street by only thin cotton blinds. There is even a meta-boundary crossed, as Duras takes her memories and feelings and externalizes them in the form of her writing. What has been internal and private becomes external and public."The Lover" is an autobiographical love story set in a post-colonial environment. We owe the remarkable transcription of this literary masterpiece to the artistry and creativity of Jean-Jacques Annaud. In this production, he has successfully combined two art forms, the beauty of the written word with the fascination of the image. I believe that the film has been, for the most part, misunderstood in this country, and I would recommend a second, more open-minded look at it. It will be a worthwhile experience.

This is a love story , not a pornographic movie. The scenes dealing with sex are wonderfully filmed, as no other director has done it before. Sex doesn't belong to the instinctual side of the human beings here, sex is about self discovery and the discovery of a new world. This self discovery brings not only passion, but also other feelings like hate, shame, anger, guilt and love. I don't know why people ask if the sex scenes are real or not because this is not the point here, it is the love story that's interesting, not the problem of the actors having intercourse or not. The fact that the movie is based on M. Duras's novel, explains the poetic language used by the narrator.