Memorable, crazy movie

Let's be realistic.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Indochine (1992) Colonial Indochina, the last 25 years. The 1930s. The struggle against European colonialism. French woman adopts Vietnamese girl. Rubber plantation owner with her father. powerful in a time when women usually were the opposite. Magnificent mountains. Spectacular cinematography. Opium. Painted faces in Vietnamese Opera. Cross-cultural love triangle. Between mother, adopted daughter, and forbidden French officer. Éliane, Camille, and Jean-Baptiste. Sides are chosen. Camille shoots a French officer for shooting a Vietnamese family. Jean-Baptiste protects her. Both are hidden with the locals, Communists. Secret River. Gorgeous long shots. They give birth to a son, Étienne. He is sent to live with his grandmother, Éliane. Jean-Baptiste murdered. Powerful scene when Camille is finally released from prison, five years later; Mother and daughter finally reunited, though both have changed dramatically. Especially daughter, who chooses to escape with the Communists to defend her country rather than meet her son. Éliane abandons everything, selling her plantation to Thanh's (young Communist originally engaged to Camille, in the end married her only to aid her escape to go find Jean-Baptiste) mother, moving to France. Fast forward to the present. We see that we have been watching what Éliane has been telling her adopted son, Étienne about his mother. They are on their way to Switzerland, where she is a Vietnamese Communist delegate at the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference. This is his opportunity to finally meet his mother. He instead waits in the lobby for her to recognize him. Of course, she does not. Having left and missed his chance, Étienne unsentimentally says that she, Éliane, is his real mother. Maybe a little long, but only slightly. More likely, pacing could be improved. Notable suspension of disbelief is necessary. Filmed on location in France, Malaysia, and Vietnam, the lush and gorgeous landscapes and overall cinematography. Engaging story. Wonderful music. Powerful performances, especially by matriarch Catherine Deneuve. Quite educational, not many films on Indochina out there, especially not before the Vietnam War. Minh Tam expresses, "I will never understand French love stories. They're all about madness, fury, suffering; similar to our war stories." Add "beauty" to that and you have a perfect film description. Gorgeous epic film, Choosing sides in love and war, French, Vietnamese. Haibun is a prosimetric (written partly in prose and partly in verse) poem in which most commonly one haiku is included after the prose, serving as a climax or epiphany to what came before. #Haibun #PoemReview

Éliane Devries (Catherine Deneuve) adopts her Vietnamese best friends' orphan daughter Camille. She becomes one of the biggest rubber plantation owner combining both properties. Her father keeps a young Vietnamese girlfriend. She has a secret affair with French officer Jean-Baptiste Le Guen. After a dangerous incident, Camille believes that Jean-Baptiste saved her and falls in love with him.This won the Oscar for foreign film and Deneuve was nominated. It's a sprawling melodramatic romantic epic. Despite the Oscar love, I don't completely share the feeling. The epic setting is beautiful. It is grand in scale and personal in scope. I can't really get into Eliane. The most compelling character is Camille although the actress is a newcomer struggling to rise to the occasion. The romance with Jean-Baptiste is the heaviest of melodrama. It's all melodrama and not really to my taste.

This story is set in 1930, at the time when French colonial rule in Indochina is ending. An unmarried French woman who works in the rubber fields, raises a Vietnamese princess as if she was her own daughter. She, and her daughter both fall in love with a young French navy officer, which will change both their lives significantly.Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like if you mention "Vietnam" to the average American, you would have them thinking about our country's role in the Vietnam War. Specifically, how it affected our veterans. Rarely would you get anyone thinking about the country itself. And also, it may not be well-known (though it should be) that France had a far deeper history in the region than the United States ever did.This film looks great, and may have some of that glamor that is not realistic, but it does attempt to show the interaction of the French and the Vietnamese (in what was called French Indochina). Anyone interested in Vietnam or colonialism ought to check it out.

'Indochine' was released to the big screens in France by the time of my first visit in Paris in 1992, the city was then full of posters about it, I remember them even on the Champs Elysees. Going to the movies was not my priority at my first time in that splendid city, and thus more than 20 years passed until I got to see this film, probably one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the French cinema, a tentative in the historic epic and romantic saga genre set in the final decades of the French colonial rule in Indochina. As other similar projects like 'Gone with the Wind', 'Australia', 'Cold Mountain', or 'A Passage to India', it mixes a long and tortuous romantic story with a rendition of the history from the perspective of the 'white man'. It works to a large extent. Falling empires and republics in turmoil have many similar things and a charm of their own on screen.Romance and history meet in an intrigue which is a little bit too long, and too much decorated with coincidences, but then credibility to the detail is not necessarily the principal quality we look for when reading sagas or watching saga films. The main character played by Catherine Deneuve is a rich, beautiful and independent plantation owner who raises a Vietnamese adopted daughter and tries to keep the luxurious way of colonialist life while the world around her is cracking and falling apart. Her passion for an officer younger in age turns into a family drama when this one falls in love with the adoptive daughter and in political intrigue when the two take ways apart and join the anti-French forces. Cultures and ideologies mix and conflict in the film – colonialism fights nationalism and communism, cosmopolitan French style of life clashes with the traditions and religions of this area of Asia. There are many details in the film, but I also had a feeling of lack of focus, like in a very large picture full of characters and objects, but also a little blurred. Or maybe these were only background elements for director Regis Wargnier, I cannot know. The director BTW all but disappeared after a few ambitious but not very successful movies in the 90s.There are two fabulous qualities in this film which balance all the minuses. One is Catherine Deneuve. I am in love with her until she will be 150. There are only two other actresses at the same level, radiating light, intelligence, beauty in any role they play – Ingrid Bergman and Cate Blanchet. Deneuve crosses in this film many years in the story but she stays beautiful and dignified, socially strong but emotionally vulnerable. A great role. The second exceptional quality is the cinematography, and I must mention the name of the artist in charge – Francois Catonne. The landscapes filmed in location are exquisite, so are the scenes that bring back to life the cities of Indochina of the 30s. I am not sure if after watching 'Indochine' I have really a more accurate image about how that part of the world was in the 30s of the previous century, but I surely do have a beautiful one.