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In the etiquette of cinema, this is called rude editing. It may be that the film has been re-edited for its American release, but whatever the reason, characters seem to disappear before their time, or to appear on screen without having been properly introduced. It's not her regal beauty but the force of her personality that carries the viewer through a choppy screenplay not always easy to follow. Behind the movie-star facade, a real actress is at work.
#Indochine film audiodevice movie
In spite of all that, Miss Deneuve lends the movie a lot of her own instinctive intelligence. She's not a particular woman but an abstraction as she tells the victim, "Do you think I like beating my children?" Not a hair is out of place as she beats a worker for attempting to run away from the plantation. She's supremely unruffled when a man with a nosebleed attempts to make love to her. She looks ravishing from start to finish. Yet she's not so much a character as a beautiful, somewhat frosty icon, like the statue of Marianne, the official symbol of the French Republic for which Miss Deneuve's likeness was used in 1985. Eliane has her weaknesses: she falls in love with the wrong man, and she occasionally seeks solace in a pipe of opium.
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Though Eliane is the film's focal point, she is not Scarlett O'Hara. It's not easy for any movie, even one running for 2 hours and 35 minutes, to cover so much time and history and still maintain its coherence as drama. When last heard from in 1954, she's at the table in Geneva, a member of the Indochinese committee negotiating independence from France. I'm not giving away one-tenth of what happens in the movie by reporting that the feckless Tanh turns out to be a sort of Vietnamese Scarlet Pimpernel, a dedicated, recklessly brave Vietnamese freedom fighter and Communist.Ĭamille, too, is politicized, becoming known as "the red princess" for her underground activities. It's the beginning of the end for both the motherland and Eliane. The pretty teen-ager, an Annamese princess, was adopted by Eliane after her parents - Eliane's best friends - were killed in an accident.Įliane puts her foot down, but Camille runs off to join Jean-Baptiste at the remote outpost to which Eliane has arranged that he be sent. She is bringing up Camille (Linh Dan Pham) as her own daughter. She was born and reared in Indochina, which she considers as much her home as it is for the anonymous laborers who work on her plantation. Though French by birth, she has never seen France. In 1930 Eliane enjoys all the perks that accrue to the dominant class in a smoothly functioning colonial society. The subject is potentially rich, but the screenplay, whomped up by three screenwriters in collaboration with Regis Wargnier, the director, has neither the conviction of fact, the sense of revelation found in good fiction, nor the fun of trashy literature. "Indochine" is the story of the last 25 years of French rule in Indochina as reflected by the events in Eliane's life.
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Miss Deneuve has her work cut out for her, since the new French film, made on location at great expense and with attention to historical accuracy, intends to be nothing less than epic. She plays Eliane who, when first met in 1930, divides her time between a mansion near Saigon and a successful rubber plantation, which she oversees with (sometimes for) her widowed father.
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She can't change the course of the film, but her lofty presence keeps it from flying apart. Catherine Deneuve reigns in "Indochine." That is, she presides over its second-rate fiction with the manner of an empress who knows her powers are constitutionally limited but who continues to take her duties seriously.