Indochine

Another foreign film that TCM ran during 31 Days of Oscar that I only got to watch just before it expired from YouTube TV's cloud DVR is Indochine. It's one of those movies that I think I'd heard about when it was first released 30-plus years ago back when I was in college, but never had the chance to watch until TCM finally showed it. Having watched it just before it expired, I've written up this post and held it back for when I needed to put up another post here.

Cathrine Deneuve, the one cast member whose name will be recognizable to people who aren't fans of French cinema, stars as Éliane. She's a widow in French Indochina in the early 1930s, at a time when the French had one large territory that would eventually be split up into Cambodia, Laos, and first North and South Vietnam before those two entities were reunified in 1975. Specifically, Élian owns and manages her late husband's rubber plantation in the Mekong river valley not far from Saigon. She also manages a second plantation that was owned by the Vietnamese parents of a young girl named Camille (Linh-Dam Phan) before they died. Éliane, who was very close to the couple, is now Camille's foster mother as well as managing the plantation for Camille to take over after she reaches adulthood.

Camille is ethnically Vietnamese, but part of that upper-crust of Vietnamese that tried to become much more culturally French. She's kinda-sorta engaged to Thanh, the son of another wealthy ethnic Vietnamese but culturally French family. Thanh has been studying in France with the view that he and Camille should marry after he finishes his studies. Except that he gets himself expelled from metropolitan France for engaging in political protests on behalf of Vietnamese independence activists.

All of this is upset by the arrival of Jean-Baptiste Guen (Vincent Pérez), a young French naval officer who has been stationed in Saigon. He and Camille meet at an art auction, and it's more or less love at first sight, even though there's a substantial age difference between them. Camille knows nothing about this relationship, in part because she's away at a Catholic boarding school. She and her fellow students are out on the streets of Saigon when a prisoner tries to escape from a prison transport. This results in shooting, with the prisoner being shot dead and bleeding out on Camille, who faints from the horror. But because she's got blood on her the natural assumption is that she's been shot. And who should come to provide first aid but Jean-Baptiste? As a result, Camille thinks he's saved her life and falls in love with her.

For all this, Jean-Baptiste gets exiled to northern Vietnam, eventually to a really faraway outpost that serves as the point where unscrupulous people bring laborers to be transported south to work as essentially indentured servants on the plantations in the south. Thanh, who by this time has become a relatively high-ranking Communist activist, lets Camille head north to try to find Jean-Baptiste. She does and the two consummate their relationship. But tragedy is going to ensue because Jean-Baptiste becomes a deserter and the French are going after the Communists even harder.

Reading the reviews on Indochine, I see that it's one that rather divides opinion. Having said that, I come down on the side of really liking it, in fact for what is probably the reason that is engenders such divided opinion. The thing about Indochine is that, although it's a French film (although filmed in part on location in Vietnam), it's one that, had the story been filmed in English, would fit in very well with Hollywood conventions. There's nothing arthouse here. Some people will argue that Indochine is framing the story too much from the French point of view, and that may be true, but frankly, I didn't care. The story is engaging on its own. Deneuve also gives a very good performance, while the location cinematography is gorgeous. If the movie has one flaw, it's the fact that it's pretty darn long at close to 160 minutes. I do think it would have benefited from a tighter script.

In any case, Indochine is definitely a movie that deserves to be seen.