"The Lover," a 1992 period piece set in French colonial Vietnam, depicts the sordid love affair of a 30-year-old Chinaman, played by Tony Leung, and a 15-year-old French girl. In a Romeo & Juliet-meets-Lolita setup, the French girl is poor and the Chinaman rich, and ultimately, their year and a half relationship comes to an end when the man is forced to marry the girl chosen for him by his father.
Set in 1920s Saigon, the Lover is borderline soft-core porn with its steamy scenes of afterschool sex. The movie is an adaptation of Marguerite Duras' autobiographical novel, L'Amant, published in 1984, which means Duras was a frisky young lady growing up.
But I now know why my father always had a soft spot for this erotic piece of cinema, and it's not because the cinematography is as beautiful as the girl. The movie was filmed at Jean Jacques Rousseau, my father's highschool here in Saigon, and is, I believe, the root cause for a generation of older men fixated on marrying younger women. Not surprising. Cherry picking is par for the course here in Asia.
1 comments:
Dude! Hilarious. I was JUST discussing this movie w/ a friend of mine. I can't remember the context - perhaps in light of my upcoming trip? Either way we were recounting how the guy in it had "a hard roll" for a buttocks.
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