Financial Times (London,England)
June 18, 1992, Thursday
Empty lovers -
By STEPHEN AMIDON
THE LOVER (18) MGMs West End
PARADISE (12) MGMs West
AUTOBUS (15) Renoir
HOMEWORK (18) Metro
STONE COLD (18) Odeon Marble Arch
The onslaught of saucy TV advertisements and rumours of actual on-camera sex seem to suggest that The Lover is going to be this season’s sophisticated erotic offering, a legitimate skinflick on a par with Betty Blue or Last Tango in Paris. In the event, the film proves to be a strangely staid and uninvolving experience. Based on Marguerite Duras’s bestselling novel, it tells the story of an impoverished 15-year-old French girl (Jane March) who enters into an affair with a wealthy, 32-year-old Chinese (Tony Leung) in 1930s Vietnam. They meet on a barge crossing the Mekong River and are soon spending afternoons making prolonged love in his bachelor pad in the city’s noisy, exotic Cholon district. Despite the intense intimacy of these sessions, it soon becomes clear that their relationship is doomed by the mutual racism of their families and the unbridgeable chasm between their cultures. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud has stretched Duras’s brief novel into a big, sumptuous picture, beautifully shot and impeccable in its detailed evocation of colonial Vietnam. When he trains his camera on the swollen Mekong River or the tattily sprawling colonial buildings of old Saigon, you get a real sense of what the last days of that particular empire must have looked and sounded like. He also draws a convincing portrait of the girl’s rancorous, dissolving family, hating one another yet forced by their poverty and foreign status to cling together. Most notable here is Arnaud Giovaninetti as the dissolute eldest son, particularly when he mocks his mother’s tears as the boat taking him home in disgrace leaves harbour. Where the film proves sorely lacking is its depiction of the central relationship. Despite the graphically sweaty love scenes and those languorous silences in the back of limousines, the affair between the unnamed French girl and Chinese man fails to ignite. Annaud and co-writer Gerard Brach seem to think that writhing nudity in some way excuses the cool, detached banality of the clothed scenes. As a result, you never really feel the risk and passion involved as the lovers break cultural taboos. They are just a couple having lots and lots of sex. To make matters worse, March proves unable to evoke her character’s simultaneous sexual and moral awakenings, the very qualities that made Duras’ novel so memorable. She seems old beyond her years before the affair even begins, a sort of petulantly pubescent Emmanuelle. The Lover is like its heroine, nice to look at but hard to like. Paradise is an oddly palatable serving of cinematic syrup. It tells the story of a 10-year-old boy (Elijah Wood) who is sent from his big city, single-parent home to spend the summer in the southern coastal town of Paradise. At first, the place seems unlikely to live up to its name, with his host couple (Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) going through a decidedly rough marital patch engendered by the accidental death of their own son a few years back. Gradually, however, the boy, who has problems of his own with his father’s recent abandonment, proves a salve for everybody’s psychic wounds. It is not hard to see how this sort of coming-of-age, coming-to-terms saga could have gone disastrously wrong, especially as it emanates from that bottomless well of sentimentality, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures. But writer/director Mary Agnes Donoghue manages to keep things pretty well under control, using low-key humour and a nicely wistful pace to avoid bludgeoning the viewer’s sensibilities. She is greatly aided by the impressive Wood, as well as by Griffith and Johnson, who turn in handsome and restrained performances. Only with a needless sub-plot involving tomboy Thora Birch and her wayward father does the film go over the top. A very different form of sentimentality is at work in Autobus, a witty and anarchic look at youthful alienation, French style. It tells the story of a young man (Yvan Attal) who decides to hitch a ride to see his girlfriend. He accomplishes this by the rather unorthodox step of hijacking a bus loaded with school children in what turns out to be a weird attempt to impress the girl with his devotion. Quickly dubbed ‘The Sentimental Terrorist’ by the press, he eludes the police for nearly two days before finally reaching his goal, winning over along the way the bus’s kids, tough guy driver and supervising teacher. Despite the rather improbable subject matter, writer/director Eric Rochant has created a funny, charming story that pokes fun at itself without undermining its feeling. As with his fine first film, A World Without Pity, Rochant pulls of the nearly impossible stunt of being a full-blown romantic without giving in to corniness or pretension. Homework, by the Mexican director Jaime Humbert Hermosillo, is a clever piece of celluloid wit that will probably only appeal to the pasty souls who haunt arthouse cinemas. Set entirely in the study of a small apartment, it shows the efforts of Virginia (Maria Rojo) to complete an assignment for her film class, which seems to involve making an hour’s worth of uncut documentary footage. To do this, she hides her camera under the table and then invites over an ex-boyfriend (Jose Alonso) with the intention of taping her seduction of him – without his knowledge. He spots the camera and storms off just before they graduate from heavy petting, only to return a short while later, his interest and male vanity piqued. More a cunningly ironic essay on cinematic voyeurism than a full blooded film, Homework proves too slight to carry the viewer the distance, even with the twist ending. It is notable primarily for a sequence of sexual gymnastics in a hammock which would make the leads in The Lover blush and seems to indicate that the Mexico has yet to ratify the Law of Gravity. The makers of Stone Cold seem intent on suspending other laws, such as those governing commonsense and decency. The story, such as it is, concerns a renegade cop (Brian Bosworth) who infiltrates a Mississippi motorcycle gang to bring them to justice. He succeeds, but only after they massacre the entire Mississippi Supreme Court, which does not seem like much of a victory for the forces of good. Bosworth is a former American Football star with a face right out of Marvel Comics and a body that looks like 15 stone of bleached beef. The film ends up nothing more than a pacey bloodbath in which motorcycles, naked women and gunshot wounds are served up with equal dispassion.
