Indochine

In the last year or so, French cinema has taken a retrospective look at its country's colonial legacy in Southeast Asia through such films as The Lover and (the not-yet released in the U.S.) Dien Bien Phu. Now the Academy Award-nominated (for Best Actress and Foreign Language Film) Indochine joins this nostalgic roster of films as a sweeping, melodramatic epic that captures -- mostly from the Eurocentric perspective -- the twilight years of France's golden, colonial grasp of Vietnam during the 1920s and '30s. Established as a recollective narrative with voiceover narration by Deneuve, the film opens as Eliane (Deneuve) adopts the only daughter of a royal couple after they are tragically killed in an airplane crash. By adopting the young princess, Eliane's family is able to expand its rubber plantation through acquisition of the child's bountiful inheritance. Moving forward to 1930, Eliane and her widowed father (Marteau) run a very profitable plantation, have all the luxuries afforded to the French ruling class, and Eliane's adopted daughter -- now known as Camille (Pham) -- has become thoroughly assimilated into French culture as a 16-year-old Catholic schoolgirl who practices the tango with her beloved mother. Mother and daughter are inseparable until a French naval officer -- Jean Baptiste (Perez) -- arrives on the scene as a romantic intruder, and manages to melt the long-frozen resolve of Eliane -- only to eventually discard her after their brief love affair. When he saves Camille's life during a shoot-out in the streets of Saigon (not knowing, of course, that she is Eliane's adopted daughter), Camille falls madly in love with him -- much to the dismay of her mother. Through a government official (Yanne), Eliane manages to have Jean Baptiste transferred to a no-man's land in the Tonkin islands of northern Indochina -- and hopefully out of her and Camille's life for good. Yet, Eliane underestimates her daughter's strong will and desire for Jean Baptiste, for Camille deserts an arranged marriage and undertakes a strenuous journey to find him. At times moving and enthralling in the tradition of David Lean's epics during the 1960s, Wargnier's film nevertheless tends to opt for nostalgic beauty and a neutral political stance in its historical depiction of this episode in French colonialism. True, the scenery is lovely, and Deneuve proves that she is still a cool beauty in crisp white linen and silk chiffon, but her character's maternal melodrama is the dominant pretty side that overshadows the ugly reality that the film chooses to only pay lip-service to: the exploitation of natural resources and the imperialistic suppression of native peoples by Europeans. Perhaps the French do not yet have an applicable translation for “politically correct.”