Blaine: My dad kept asking me if he has ever shown me “The Lover” and I told him “No”. So he rented it on Amazon and showed it to me.
Plot(Spoiler Alert)
Set in 1929 in Vietnam, a fifteen year old French girl has a love affair with a wealthy Chinese man who is in his early thirties.
Blaine: Director Jean-Jacques Annard said that there isn’t that much dialog in the “The Lover" which wasn't a problem because it was more about telling a story with images. My dad says the scenes work really well. Street scenes where local people cross in front of the camera as it pans and people move out of the way for a car to come into the shot, for example. He also said every shot is perfectly crafted. There’s a lot of wide lens shots every time it shows the two main characters inside the car. One of the images my dad likes is of the man and woman in a room during the afternoon and the afternoon light comes in through the blinds. There’s a long shot where the car is moving through and at the same time there is a boat going underneath the bridge.
Jean-Jacques Annard had seen a lot of romance films that weren’t his type so he decided to make his own romantic film of something that is more his taste. He loved the romance novel, “The Lover”. Everything is nice during the first hour of “The Lover" until the girl’s family meets her lover and they become ass holes to him.
Jean needed to find a young lady between the ages of 15 and 17 in order to play the lead female character. More than a thousand women auditioned for the role. Jean would meet with some of them in person and test them out. Jean said every one of these ladies wanted to be an actress, but a lot of them have so little in them. I feel bad just thinking about telling all those young ladies who auditioned that they didn’t get the job because a lot of women wanted to be in this film and only one could be chosen. That’s what Jean felt. Jean then met Jane March and she didn’t say much when Jean was interviewing her, but there was something about her that was different from the other girls he met with. Jean had “The Lover” book with him and he had Jane give the same look as the girl’s face on the cover of the book. He put the book next to Jane’s face and found out that they both have the same shaped head and the same look on their eyes. Jane March would have to go through a screen test to see if she was suitable for the part. Author Marguerite Duras had described what the character looks like through her book and Jane March would try on the same type of clothes and put her hair in pigtails the same way she is described in the book.
“The Lover” was more popular in Paris than America. It got positive reviews from French critics, but American critics gave it negative reviews. Jane March didn’t get a lot of film opportunities after “The Lover”, which is sad. She has done some acting, but not in anything knowable or successful.
My rating on “The Lover” is four and a half out of five stars.
Many thanks to my dad for helping me with this blog
