Korean Title: Yeonin
Starring: Arnaud Giovaninetti, Tony Leong, Jane March, Frederique Meininger
Director: Jean-Jacques Arnaud
Studio: Dream Mix
Rating: 18+
Genre: Drama

About This DVD

The Lover is director Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' minimalist 1984 novel. Set in French Indochina in 1929, the film explores the erotic charge of forbidden love. Jane March plays a French teenager sent to a Saigon boarding school, while Tony Leung is a 32-year Chinese aristocrat. They look at each and they both see a blinding white flash; it's kismet. He offers her a ride in his limousine and soon they meet in his "bachelor room" where they revel in a wide variety of creative sexual encounters. However, they both realize their love is doomed. She comes from a troubled family that includes a mentally-disturbed mother (Frederique Meininger) and drug-addicted brother (Arnaud Giovaninetti). It also appears that her family would not approve of an interracial tryst. But then neither would his family, since in order to inherit his father's wealth, he must not break from a traditional Chinese arranged marriage.

Jean Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras' autobiographical novel is a highly attractive, though basically insipid piece of soft-core porn. Based on Duras' recollection of an affair she conducted as a teenage girl and starring Jane March with a wealthy Chinese businessman (Tony Leung) in the Indochina of the 1920s, the film traces the relationship from the couple's electric first meeting on a cruise ship to a final assignation years later. Much of the lovers' attraction for each other is based on their transgression of the taboos of the time and place: she is white, he is Asian, she is middle-class, he has inherited wealth, she is 15, he is 32. Duras explored the barriers to love, cultural and otherwise, with far greater depth in Alain Renais' classic Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which suggested that the individual's past is a more formidable obstacle to love than more obvious differences. Here the filmmakers make much more of these distinctions of class and race without ever examining the character of the lovers, and the film degenerates into a series of meaningless couplings in the businessman's drab apartment. Still, both actors are capable performers both in and out of the clothes, and it's very clear exactly what they see in each other.

Audio Format:	DD 2.0 Stereo
Video Format:	Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic)
Languages:	English, French, Japanese
Subtitles:	Korean, Japanese
Country Made:	Korea
Region Code:	3
Year Made:	1996
Running Time:	114
Special Features:	- Interactive Menu - Scene Selections - Theatrical trailer - Other Trailers - About the Film - Making Film
Availability:	Usually ships in 5-10 days