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Indochine (film)
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Wikipedia article
'Indochine' is a 1992 French period drama film set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s. It is the story of liane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement. The screenplay was written by novelist rik Orsenna, screenwriters Louis Gardel and Catherine Cohen, and director Rgis Wargnier. The film stars Catherine Deneuve, Vincent Prez, Linh Dan Pham, Jean Yanne and Dominique Blanc. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 65th Academy Awards.
Plot
The story is narrated by liane Devries, a woman born to French parents in colonial Indochina, and is told through flashbacks. In 1930, liane runs her and her widowed father's large rubber plantation with many indentured laborers, whom she casually refers to as her coolies, and divides her days between her homes at the plantation and outside Saigon. She is also the adoptive mother of Camille, whose birth parents were friends of liane's and members of the Nguyn Dynasty. Guy Asselin, the head of the French security services in Indochina, courts liane, but she rejects him and raises Camille alone giving her the education of a privileged European through her teens.
liane meets a young French Navy lieutenant, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, when they bid on the same painting at an auction. She is flustered when he challenges her publicly and surprised when he turns up at her plantation days later, searching for a boy whose sampan he set ablaze on suspicion of opium smuggling. liane and Jean-Baptiste begin a torrid affair.
Camille meets Jean-Baptiste by chance one day when he rescues her from a terrorist attack. Believing him to have saved her life, Camille falls in love with Jean-Baptiste at first sight, while Jean-Baptiste has no inkling of Camille's relation to liane. When liane learns of Camille's love for Jean-Baptiste, she uses her connections with high-ranking Navy officials to get Jean-Baptiste transferred to Haiphong. Jean-Baptiste angrily confronts liane about his transfer during a Christmas party at her home, resulting in a heated argument where he slaps her in front of his fellow officers. For his transgression, Jean-Baptiste is sent to the notorious Dragon Islet (Hn Rng), a remote French military base in northern Indochina.
liane allows Camille to become engaged to Thanh, a pro-Communist Vietnamese boy expelled as a student from France because of his support for the 1930 Yn Bi mutiny. A sympathetic Thanh allows Camille to search for Jean-Baptiste up north. Camille travels on foot and eventually makes it to Dragon Islet, where she and a Vietnamese family she travels with are imprisoned alongside other laborers. When Camille comes across the sight of her traveling companions brutally tortured and murdered by French officers, she attacks a French officer and shoots him in the struggle. Jean-Baptiste defies his superiors to protect Camille in the ensuing firefight, and the two set sail and escape Dragon Islet as outlaws.
After spending several days adrift in the Gulf of Tonkin, Camille and Jean-Baptiste reach land and are taken in by a Communist theater troupe, who offers the couple refuge in a secluded valley. After several months, Camille has become pregnant with Jean-Baptiste's child, but are told they must vacate the valley out of safety. Thanh, now a high-ranking Communist operative, arranges for the theater troupe to smuggle the lovers into China.
Guy attempts to use operatives to quell the growing insurrections by laborers and to locate Camille and Jean-Baptiste, without success. Camille and Jean-Baptiste's story becomes a celebrated legend in tung performances by Vietnamese actors, earning Camille the popular nickname "the Red Princess". When the couple nears the Chinese border, Jean-Baptiste takes his and Camille's newborn son to baptize him in a river while she's asleep. After christening the baby tienne, he is ambushed and apprehended by several French soldiers. A distraught Camille evades capture and escapes with the theater troupe, while French authorities remand Jean-Baptiste to a Saigon jail and hand tienne over to liane.
After some days in prison, Jean-Baptiste agrees to talk if he can first see his son. The Navy, which has authority over the case and refuses to subject Jean-Baptiste to interrogation by the police, plans to court-martial Jean-Baptiste in Brest, France to avoid the public outcry that would likely arise from a trial in Indochina. Jean-Baptiste is allowed a 24-hour visitation with tienne before being taken to France. He goes to see liane, who lets him stay with tienne at her Saigon residence for the night.
The next day, liane finds Jean-Baptiste dead in his bed with a gunshot to his temple, a gun in hand, and an unharmed tienne. Outraged, liane tells Guy she suspects the police murdered him, but Guy's girlfriend tells liane that the Communists may have killed Jean-Baptiste to silence him. With no evidence sought for either suspicion, Jean-Baptiste's death is ruled a suicide. Camille is captured and sent to Poulo-Condor a high security prison where visitors are not permitted and not even liane or Guy can help free her. After five years, the Popular Front comes to power and releases all political prisoners including Camille. liane reunites with Camille, but she declines to return to her mother and son, choosing instead to join the Communists and fight for Vietnam's independence. Camille reasons she does not wish for her son to know the horrors she has witnessed, and tells her mother that French colonialism is drawing to an end. Taking tienne with her, liane sells her plantation and leaves Indochina.
In 1954, liane finishes telling her story to a grown tienne. They have both come to Switzerland, where Camille is a Vietnamese Communist Party delegate to the Geneva Conference. tienne goes to the negotiators' hotel intending to find his birth mother, but it is so crowded with people that he is not sure how Camille can find or recognize him. He tells liane he sees her as his mother.
As the film concludes, an epilogue notes the next day, French Indochina becomes independent from France and Vietnam is partitioned into North and South Vietnam (leading, eventually, to the Vietnam War).
Cast
*Catherine Deneuve as liane Devries
*Vincent Prez as Jean-Baptiste
*Linh Dan Pham as Camille
*Jean Yanne as Guy
*Dominique Blanc as Yvette
*Henri Marteau as mile
*Thi Hoe Tranh Huu Trieu as Mme. Minh Tam
*Eric Nguyen as Thanh
*Jean-Baptiste Huynh as tienne
*Carlo Brandt as Castellani
*Hubert Saint-Macary as Raymond
*Andrzej Seweryn as Hbrard
*Thibault de Montalembert as Charles-Henri
*Nh Qunh as Sao
Production
The film was shot mainly in Imperial City, Hue, Ha Long (Ha Long Bay) and Ninh Binh (Pht Dim Cathedral) in Vietnam. Butterworth in Malaysia was used as a substitute for Saigon and liane Devries' "Lang-Sai" plantation house was actually Crag Hotel in Penang, Malaysia. Some parts were filmed in Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, in George Town, Penang, Malaysia.
Principal photography began on April 8, 1991 and concluded on August 22, 1991.
Release
Box office
The film received a total of 3,198,663 cinema-goers in France, making it the 6th most attended film of the year. The film also grossed $5,603,158 in North America.Critical reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 'Indochine' holds an approval rating of 72% based on 18 reviews.Critics' reviews praised the film's photography and scenery, while citing issues with the plot and character development. Roger Ebert wrote the film "intends to be the French '
Rita Kempley of 'The Washington Post' found the transformation of Camille from a naive, pampered innocent to Communist revolutionary to be a compelling plot line, but noted, "The trouble is we never see the fragile teenager undergo this surprising metamorphosis. Director Regis Wargnier seems far more interested in what the white folks are doing back on the plantation". She commented further, "Wargnier, who learned his craft at the elbow of Claude Chabrol, does expose the geographic splendors of Southeast Asia as well as the common sense of its people, whose sly observations lend 'Indochine'
Of the film's metaphorical mother-daughter relationship between liane and her adopted Vietnamese daughter Camille, Nick Davis said 'Indochine'
Accolades
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|-
! Award
! Category
! Nominee(s)
! Result
|-
| 20/20 Awards
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| Academy Awards
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| Best Actress
| rowspan="2"| Catherine Deneuve
|
|-
| Awards Circuit Community Awards
| Best Actress in a Leading Role
|
|-
| British Academy Film Awards
| Best Film Not in the English Language
| Eric Heumann and Rgis Wargnier
|
|-
| rowspan="12"| Csar Awards
| Best Film
| rowspan="2"| Rgis Wargnier
|
|-
| Best Director
|
|-
| Best Actress
| Catherine Deneuve
|
|-
| Best Supporting Actor
| Jean Yanne
|
|-
| Best Supporting Actress
| Dominique Blanc
|
|-
| Most Promising Actress
| Linh Dan Pham
|
|-
| Best Cinematography
| Franois Catonn
|
|-
| Best Costume Design
| Pierre-Yves Gayraud and Gabriella Pescucci
|
|-
| Best Editing
| Genevive Winding
|
|-
| Best Original Music
| Patrick Doyle
|
|-
| Best Production Design
| Jacques Bufnoir
|
|-
| Best Sound
| Dominique Hennequin and Guillaume Sciama
|
|-
| Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Awards
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| Golden Globe Awards
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| Goya Awards
| colspan="2"| Best European Film
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| National Board of Review Awards
| colspan="2"| Top Five Foreign Language Films
|
|-
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| New York Film Critics Circle Awards
| colspan="2"| Best Foreign Language Film
|
|-
| rowspan="2"| Political Film Society Awards
| colspan="2"| Democracy
|
|-
| colspan="2"| Human Rights
|
|}
* The film was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
See also
* List of submissions to the 65th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
* List of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
References
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