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REVIEWS, Page 72CINEMAMademoiselle Saigon
By RICHARD CORLISS
TITLE: INDOCHINE
DIRECTOR: Regis Wargnier
WRITERS: Erik Orsenna, Louis Gardel, Catherine Cohen and
Regis Wargnier
THE BOTTOM LINE: Catherine Deneuve lends glamour and
gravity to a moving epic of the French in Vietnam.
If you were to select an ambassador of European culture,
it might be Catherine Deneuve. If you were to choose a film to
express the agony and ambiguity of Vietnam in this century, it
should be Indochine.
The French have an itch to colonize. For centuries they
explored, exploited and educated on three continents. Now their
working tours of Africa, North America and Southeast Asia are
over. The reverie fades like a holiday suntan; the legacy
lingers like a scar. Why shouldn't that wound, which France
inflicted on itself and its colonial subjects, be diagnosed on
a big screen? Spurred by conscience, retrospection and, not
least, the success of Hollywood movies about the U.S. war in
Southeast Asia, French moviemakers are gazing into the rearview
mirror of their Vietnam.
Perhaps that mirror is blurred by tropical humidity and
nostalgie de la boue. Whatever the reason, the French view of
Southeast Asia is less wide- and wild-eyed than Oliver Stone's
version in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The
perspective in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover is as cloistered
in its 1920s Saigon love nest as the French were from awareness
of the impending revolution. Pierre Schoendoerffer's Dien Bien
Phu (yet to open in the U.S.) meticulously restages the
climactic French defeat as if it were all about artillery and
not national destinies. The French are at times inhibited by
good taste and historical scrupulousness.
Regis Wargnier's Indochine takes a gentler, more
comprehensive approach. It suggests that the French, at the
twilight of their long rule in Indochina, saw themselves not as
the region's colonizers -- ravaging its natural and human
resources -- but as its foster parents, nourishing a lovely,
lorn child with the civilizing bounty of French culture. That,
anyway, is Indochine's explicit metaphor. Eliane (Catherine
Deneuve), the owner of a rubber plantation, raises Camille (Linh
Dan Pham), an orphan princess of Annam, as her own daughter.
What could separate these two beautiful women? Only the
nationalist uprising of the 1940s and the women's competing love
for a handsome French officer (Vincent Perez), a kind of Lieut.
Pinkerton in this Mademoiselle Saigon.
Filmed in Vietnam, Malaysia, Switzerland and France,
covering 155 minutes of screen time and 30 years of convulsive
history, Indochine sprawls and enthralls. It has the breadth and
intelligence of the David Lean epics from whose plots it
borrows: the juggling of passion and politics in Doctor Zhivago,
the muddle of racial emotions in A Passage to India, the
grandiose failure of colonial outsiders in The Bridge on the
River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But Indochine's vision is
essentially feminine; its ample grief is that of a mother
mourning her lost children in a land shifting and receding under
her feet.
And in Deneuve, Indochine has a star of epic glamour and
gravity. Her acting craft gives heft to Eliane's gestures, each
more heroic than the one before. Her ageless beauty makes
Eliane convincing as both a young woman in love with Vietnam and
a grandmother ready to raise another orphan and make it her
own. In 1985 the actress was the model for the French national
symbol Marianne. Deneuve's presence in Indochine is like some
burnished monument to the French spirit miraculously preserved
on the streets of Saigon.