A trip to an exotic land with 'Indochine'

8/18/13 Indochine, Best Foreign Film, 1992

What better way to spend a day off than to get new tires on your car? Well, you can top it off with writing a review on a beautiful movie and then heading off to St. Cloud to hear Dar Williams. Let me say this first, I think that Catherine Deneuve is terribly under-appreciated in the US. Most people may know her from her makeup commercials or The Hunger (which I have never seen, or not yet, anyway); I haven't seen most of her movies either, but when I do, I always want more. Indochine is set in French Indochina and tells the story of a rubber plantation owner, Eliane Devries (Deneuve) and her relationship with her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille. Camille was orphaned after her parents, who were royalty, were killed in a plane crash. It is a sweeping story that covers several decades (1910s through the 1950s) and over that time examines the impacts of French colonialism on the region, as well as the swirl of Communism coming over from neighboring China. Oh, and there is Devries's relationships with her workers, the opium den, Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, a French naval officer, much younger than Devries. As you can tell from my few sentences, there is a lot happening in this movie and you really have to watch it unfold to appreciate it. It helps to have a little understanding of the regional history (FYI, the war in Vietnam did not start in the 1960s with the United States). I think it is interesting to see movies or read stories that examine another country's imperial and colonial history (I am not using those terms pejoratively, so I hope they are not taken that way) since I am much more familiar with the colonial past of the United States. Always looking for the teachable moment. The settings are beautiful, with great vista views, as well as scenes filmed in 1930s/1940s Saigon. This movie is very patient and deliberate with its pacing to let the narrative unfold (this is code for it is a long film), but I did like it very much. Catherine Deneuve owns her role, and goes through a variety of emotions and there were a few moments I did not like her very much, but she definitely played a very strong female character. Indochine won for Best Foreign film and Deneuve was nominated as Best Actress (similar to Amour in 2012). She lost out to Emma Thompson in Howards End, and I saw that movie when it first came out; Emma Thompson is good in just about everything, but I just don't know if she beat out Deneuve here. The movies are polar opposites, so it may not be a fair comparison, but there you go.