INDOCHINE: Blu-ray (Paradis/Bac/Orly/Cine Cinq, 1992) Sony Home Entertainment
A sumptuously photographed, oft intricately
crafted, affecting saga of lost loves and missed opportunities, director,
Régis
Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), endeavors, rather transparently – if, as
effectively - to be the sort, set against civil unrest for which the likes of Sir
David Lean had been justly celebrated in his prime. Lean, who died the year
before, with 1984’s A Passage to India to mark his cinematic farewell,
is very much in evidence in the methodical cadence of Wargnier’s
direction. It takes more than 2 ½ hours
for Indochine to tell its rather straight-forward tale, scripted by
Wargnier, Érik Orsenna, Louis Gardel, and, Catherine Cohen. And Wargnier, as
Lean before him, shares in that implicit and uncanny grasp of the story’s
content as well as its character – to offer layer upon layer of critical
analysis regarding France’s annexation, and later sacrifice of territories in
what is today, Vietnam. The 6th highest grossing picture in its
native France, and Oscar-winner as Best Foreign Language Film, Indochine’s
spectacular vistas, lush and tropical, are butted against the glacial severity of
its leading lady, Catherine Deneuve as French rubber plantation owner, Éliane
Devries (shades of Bette Davis’ Leslie Crosbie in 1940’s The Letter). Lensed
mainly in Vietnam’s Imperial City, Hue, Ha Long and Ninh Binh, with Malaysia’s
Butterworth subbing for Saigon and its Crag Hotel in Penang used for the
sprawling plantation, Indochine is impressive picture-making on a very
grand scale. That said, its story is so slender and intimate, it could just as
easily have taken place in a one-bedroom-apartment in the slums of Saigon.
Our story begins with Éliane
Devries’ reflections. Born in colonial Indochina, Éliane and her widowed father,
Émile (Henri
Marteau) oversee a vast rubber plantation with many indentured laborers cruelly
disregarded and even abused as coolies. A genuinely heartless creature, who passes
her free time between homes adjacent the business and another just outside of
Saigon, Éliane adopts Camille (Linh-Dan Pham) an heir to the Nguyễn dynasty
after the child’s parents are killed in a civil uprising. Bullish Guy Asselin
(Jean Yanne), the head of the French security services,
romantically pursues Éliane. Alas, her independence clashes with his resolve,
denying his interests to become her suitor. Instead, Éliane invests everything
in Camille’s upbringing and education. At once drawn to, yet repelled by the
cheek of this dashing French Navy lieutenant, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen (Vincent Perez) during an auction, Éliane is unsettled, especially when
Jean-Baptiste shows up at her plantation, seeking to unearth the whereabouts of
a family whose sampan he torched under suspicion they were opium smugglers. After
Éliane confirms this wariness, Jean-Baptiste suffers a nose bleed. In treating the
wound, he attempts a seduction momentarily denied. However, not long
thereafter, Éliane and Jean-Baptiste begin a torrid affair, much to Émile and Guy’s
dismay. Emile threatens the young buck, after discovering him in a state of
half undress in his daughter’s bedroom. But Jean-Baptiste will not be frightened
off so easily. Actually, not at all.
However, Jean-Baptiste is torn
in his desires for Éliane and his hunger to see the world in the capacity of a
navel officer. Thus, the couple part and Éliane spends many an hour longing for
his touch. Meanwhile, Camille, who has been sent off to school, encounters Jean-Baptiste
after he intercedes in the escape of a terrorist who is shot only inches away
from her. The attack leaves Camille momentarily shellshocked and unconscious. Later,
she accredits Jean-Baptiste with saving her life and falls immediately – and madly
- in love, unknowing of his previous affair with her mother. It is also noted Jean-Baptiste
has no idea Camille is Éliane’s adopted daughter. Discovering the truth, after
Camille confides her love for Jean-Baptiste, Éliane jealously exploits her
connections with his superior, L’Admiral (Gérard Lartigau) to have him
transferred far away to Haiphong. Admonishing, and then physically assaulting Éliane
during a Christmas party, Jean-Baptiste is cruelly reassigned to the infamous Dragon
Islet, a desolate French military outpost on the fringes of northern Indochina.
Éliane consents to an engagement
between Camille and Thanh (Eric Nguyen), a pro-Communist expelled from school because
he supported the Yên Bái mutiny. Thanh’s empathy for Camille is genuine. But it
turns rancid when she goes in search of her lover instead. Camille is then
taken prisoner, along with Sao (Nhu Quynh Nguyen) and her family. Appalled by
their torture, Camille attacks one of the French officers, Charles-Henri (Thibault
de Montalembert), fatally shooting him in the head. Defying his class as well as
his superiors, Jean-Baptiste hastens his lover’s escape. The pair are reunited as
outlaws, hiding out somewhere in the Dragon Islet. Spared certain death from
starvation in the Gulf of Tonkin, Jean-Baptiste and Camille are taken in by a
Communist theater troupe, who offers them refuge in a remote but pastoral valley.
Great with Jean-Baptiste's child, Camille and Jean-Baptiste are forced yet
again into exile for their own safety. Thanh, now a high-ranking Communist
operative, arranges for the troupe to smuggle them back into China. Guy’s
attempts to hunt down Camille and Jean-Baptiste are fruitless. Instead, their tale
of survival becomes a celebrated legend in tuồng performances, earning Camille
the moniker, ‘The Red Princess’.
Nearing the Chinese border,
Jean-Baptiste momentarily separates from the troupe to baptize his child in a
nearby stream. Instead, he is taken prisoner by French soldiers. Camille evades
capture. But Jean-Baptiste is remanded to a Saigon jail, forcing him to place
his infant son, Étienne in Éliane’s care. At first refusing to talk,
Jean-Baptiste agrees to divulge his story, but only if the Navy will grant him
24-hr. leave to see his son one last time. To quell the civil unrest brewing
over the case, it has been decided Jean-Baptiste will face his court-martial in
Brest, France. Freed to visit Étienne, Jean-Baptiste is taken pity on by Éliane
who offers him refuge at her home for the night. Tragically, by dawn’s early
light, Éliane discovers Jean-Baptiste lying peacefully next to his son, though
very much dead of a gunshot wound to the head. An incensed Éliane bursts in on
Guy and his current paramour, Yvette (Dominique Blanc),
inferring Guy or the police had their hand in murdering Jean-Baptiste. An
embittered Yvette offers an alternate theory. The Communists killed Jean-Baptiste
to ensure his silence. After Éliane has left the room, Guy casually slaps Yvette.
Jean-Baptiste’s death is ruled
suicide. Camille is captured and sent to Poulo-Condor – a high security prison.
Five years pass. The Popular Front liberates all political prisoners including
Camille. Mother and daughter share in a bitter reunion. Camille declines Elaine’s
offer to return home to raise her child. Instead, she joins the Communists for
Vietnam's independence. With nothing left to fight for, Éliane sells her
plantation, taking Étienne with her abroad. The story flashes ahead to
1954 in Switzerland, where a still glamorous Éliane explains the rest of their
personal history to an adult, Étienne (Jean-Baptiste Huynh). Camille, now a Vietnamese Communist Party
delegate is addressing the Geneva Conference. Étienne goes to the hotel
intending to find his birth mother. Alas, the crowd obscures this discovery.
Recognizing a mother is more than the woman who bore him into this world, Étienne
finds Éliane by the river’s edge. He
tells her she will always be his mother. We pause upon a solitary Éliane wistfully
gazing across the still waters. An epilogue denotes the liberation of French
Indochina, partitioned into North and South Vietnam.
Indochine is rapturous in its aspirations to resurrect the mesmeric and plush epics of yore. Director, Régis Wargnier bottles the nostalgia, as well
as the licentiousness for a dying colonial empire, plying tradition with an
intrenched vanity for the way things were, but can never be again. Catherine
Deneuve typifies this yesteryear in the passing parade, flying in the face of an
historical fate not to be denied or even delayed to satisfy Éliane’s imperious
beliefs in her own divinity amongst the natives. Here, Deneuve is ageless. Regrettably,
this is somewhat problematic, especially during the latter half of our saga, as
Éliane
shows no visible signs the timeline has advanced some twenty-odd-years. François
Catonné’s cinematography is sublime, pitting the hand-crafted, stately artifice
of a failing French colony with the startlingly earthiness of its more robust
tropical paradise, just beyond these guarded horizons.
The worst of it is that the
screenplay frequently struggles to put meaningful dialogue into the mouths of its
alter-egos. Indochine is a tale of unusual beauty. Yet, only
occasionally does it satisfy from a dramatic standpoint. The transference of
carnal lust from Éliane and Jean-Baptiste into the more genuine passion between
Jean-Baptiste and Camille is awkwardly handled. Blame here may be ascribed the
writers as well as Deneuve, who struggles to transmit anything beyond a deep-seeded
gaze, burying her blonde tresses against a lover’s shoulder as he slides a
gentle hand up her skirt, to massage a thigh. Such obvious displays of
affection are ‘so French’ but ought to have been counterbalances against more cloistered
moments of anxious, heart-palpitating urges to do it all over again in the
absence of these more gratuitous flashes of sex. But no – between these sexual
respites we see very little of Éliane’s capacity to form any lingering desire,
much less to love. That said, there is
much to enjoy about this plush, padded odyssey. It clings together as a largely
escapist, occasionally engaging, but always admirable and ambitious
undertaking, definitely worth revisiting – if only to be awestruck by its inability
to achieve that level of cinematic greatness it so desperately aims for from
the outset.
Indochine arrives on
Blu-ray via Sony Home Entertainment. The results are not to Sony’s usual high
standards. For starters, this is a bare bones authoring. Sony has not even
deigned to include a menu or chapter options. The disc simply boots up at the
outset and begins to play the feature immediately. Included for consideration:
a 5.1 and 2.0 DTS audio mix. Neither is particularly distinguished, though each
has been competently rendered. The dialogue is always frontal sounding with
limited engagement of the surrounds. But the biggest disappointment here is the
visuals. This ought to have been a stunner in hi-def. However, cribbing from a
print rather than an original camera negative has resulted in an image that quite
simply fails to take in all of François Catonné’s splendor. Only close-ups
truly satisfy, revealing minute detail in hair and clothing. Long and medium
shots frequently appear quite soft, and occasionally, only a moderate step up
from a DVD presentation. Colors are generally lush, though the opening credits
suffer from some minor color fading, possibly the result of the optical
printing process.
Flesh tones are never natural in
appearance, but veer toward a ruddy orange hue. At one point, it appears as
though Éliane and Jean-Baptiste are wearing sunburnt brownish/yellow make-up.
Not attractive. Contrast is generally solid, though there is some minor black
crush throughout. This is horrendously on display during the dimly lit opium
den sequences as well as the end titles, also riddled in video-based noise.
Certain shots magnify film grain while others almost appear to have had it digitally
scrubbed. There’s no consistency to the image quality. Given the phenomenal
work Sony does elsewhere with its catalogue, to achieve miraculous results when
dealing with problematic film elements, Indochine on Blu-ray ought to
have been a ‘slam dunk’. Regrettably, it’s not. While the movie comes highly
recommended, this Blu-ray is only a so-so effort. Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
3.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
2.5
EXTRAS
0
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