The Lover
愛人／ラマン
The Moonlight essay
BooksThe Lover and the Way Memory Rewrites DesireRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
1929 Saigon; a French schoolgirl and a rich Chinese man in a room with shutters; Duras disowned the film.
French Indochina, 1929. A fifteen-year-old French girl lives in poverty with her family. Her mother, a widowed and depressed schoolteacher, lost her savings on worthless land sold to her by corrupt officials; her elder brother, Pierre, is violent and addicted to opium; her younger brother, Paul, struggles with his mental health. The girl, studious and solitary, wants to be a writer.
Crossing the Mekong by ferry on her way back to her boarding school in Saigon, she meets a Chinese man of thirty-two, the son of a wealthy property owner, newly back from studying in Paris. He offers her a lift in his luxurious car, and she tells him she is seventeen. The next day he waits for her outside her school and takes her to a room he rents in the Chinese quarter, and a sexual relationship begins. She is fifteen and he is thirty-two. The film tells it as a secret love affair; it is the sexual abuse of a minor. They meet almost daily. He falls in love with her, though she insists she does not want to be loved.
When her family finds out they are angry, then tolerate the affair and live off the man's money and gifts. Hurt by their contempt and trapped by his situation, he attacks her. His father will not allow him to marry a white French girl and holds him to a marriage arranged years before with an heiress, and the relationship falls apart.
The girl sails for France. On the ship, with the man far behind her, she understands how much she felt for him, and weeps. Decades later, when she has become a successful writer, he telephones her while visiting France with his wife. He tells her that he has never stopped loving her, and that he will love her until his death.
Starring
Jane Marchas The Young Girl
A fifteen-year-old French schoolgirl from a poor, troubled family in Indochina, who dreams of becoming a writer.
The Young Girl’s story
Crossing the Mekong on her way back to school, she accepts a lift from a rich Chinese man of thirty-two and tells him she is seventeen. She is fifteen. The next day he takes her to a room in the Chinese quarter, and a sexual relationship begins: the sexual abuse of a minor. He drives her to school and back; she tells him she does not want to be loved. Her mother and violent elder brother let him pay for their dinners while treating him with contempt. When his father holds him to an arranged marriage, he asks her to say she came to him only for money, and she says it. Sailing for France, she sees his car on the quay, and at sea she weeps. Decades later, a writer, she hears from him that he still loves her.
Tony Leung Ka-faias The Chinese Man
The thirty-two-year-old son of a wealthy Chinese family, back from Paris, bound by his father to an arranged marriage.
The Chinese Man’s story
On the Mekong ferry he shyly offers the French schoolgirl a lift in his car; she tells him she is seventeen. The next day he takes her to his room in the Chinese quarter, and a sexual relationship begins: a man of thirty-two sexually abusing a girl of fifteen. He falls in love with her, though she says she does not want to be loved. He pays for dinners at which her mother and brother treat him with contempt, and, wounded and cornered, he attacks her. His father refuses to let him marry her; he asks her to say she came to him only for money, and she does, and he marries the heiress chosen for him. Decades later, in France with his wife, he telephones to tell her he will love her until he dies.
Frédérique Meiningeras The Mother
The girl's widowed mother, a schoolteacher ruined by a swindle, who comes to tolerate the affair for the man's money.
Arnaud Giovaninettias The Elder Brother (Pierre)
The girl's elder brother, violent and addicted to opium, who torments his younger siblings.
Jeanne Moreauas Narrator (voice)
The voice that tells the story, looking back across the decades at that year in Indochina.
Why it matters
The Lover, whose images earned an Academy Award nomination for cinematography, presents as a romance a relationship that is, stated plainly, the sexual exploitation of a fifteen-year-old girl by a man of thirty-two, and that gap is the issue it now raises. It sees the forces around the pair clearly: a ruined colonial family living off the man's money, a father who forbids his son to marry a white girl, and the lines of race and class that ran through French Indochina. Marguerite Duras, whose semi-autobiographical novel it adapts, distanced herself from the film and said she wrote another version of the book in response. Jane March was a sixteen-year-old model when she was found for the part, and the tabloid attention the film's sex scenes drew fell hardest on her. He later admitted they were not. It leaves the question of who gets to tell such a story, and how.