JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD
THE LOVER (1992)
Release Date : 22/01/1992Soundtrack : Gabriel Yared
Script : Gérard Brach - Jean-Jacques Annaud
Awards : Japanese Film Critic Award for Best Director - Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing-Foreign Feature (USA) - César Award for Best Music Written for a Film to Gabriel Yared (France) - Bambi Award for Best Young Actress to Jane March (Germany).
In the late 1920s, a 15-year-old French woman (Jane March) goes back to boarding school in Saigon. The bus leaves from the Indochinese village where her ruined mother (Frédérique Meininger) is the school principal. The girl meets an elegant Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) on the ferry crossing the Mekong River. He offers her to finish the trip in his limousine. He is 32 years old and the sole heir of a wealthy man. The girl soon joins him in his bachelor pad. She discovers the first sensual pleasures that both know to be ephemeral. No one can know about this, especially not her brothers (Arnaud Giovaninetti, Melvil Poupaud). The passionate love born in the heart of the rich native has no future: he is promised to a woman of his rank. The girl must return to France. Their separation approaches and pushes the lovers to double their dates........ "A desperate idyll" (Le Nouvel Observateur). "It's a skin thing. It's simple and so beautiful" (L'Express). "One of the Best Film of the Decade" (Scene at the Movies).
