Sexual Awakening in 1992’s The Lover

In 1992, director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who in 1988 had captured film-going audience’s attention with The Bear, a film that follows the travels of an orphaned bear cub, brought to the screen author Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Lover. A work of erotic cinema, The Lover, set in 1929 French colonial Vietnam, tells the tale of a young French girl (Jane March), from a bankrupt family, who engages in a forbidden sexual relationship with a wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka Fai), who is more than double her age. It is not a relationship based on money, but one based on attraction and a love they dare not speak. While their affair transcended race, culture, class and age, for those around them, all these elements were matters of importance. Theirs was a love that could not survive; yet one they could not resist.

The Young Girl and the Chinaman

To bring Duras’s novel to life, Annaud made one important decision, to cast unknowns.

“I did not want a face with a ‘history,’” explained the director in 1992. “This is a story of ‘the first time’—had I cast a ‘name,’ audiences probably would find her innocence difficult to believe.”

Annaud searched the world over for the young woman to play his lead. “I was in despair, when my wife showed me an English magazine with a young girl in it who was different. She wasn’t any more beautiful than the others, but she had something rare in the eyes. Five photos, five expressions—unheard of! This Jane March was spectacular.”

“Jane was different than all the others,” explained Annaud. “She was a unique mixture of fear and ambition, strength and fragility, insecurities and certainties. She was, with all her contradictions, a young Marguerite Duras.”

For the role of her Chinese lover, Annaud was determined to find an actor who could portray a character caught “between traditional Chinese culture and the sophisticated European culture of the day.”

Once again he searched the world over, until on his last day of auditions in Hong Kong, and with him set to cancel the project, Leung walked into his hotel suite. “He has the generosity, the culture and the intelligence that I had always imagined the Chinese lover possessed.”

Annaud was ready to progress.

The love scenes

Principal photography on The Lover began in Vietnam on January 14, 1991 and finished 96 days later on May 4, 1991. Despite the challenges the crew faced in shooting a film in some of the most remote parts of the Mekong Delta, the director’s greatest concern was directing the love scenes, which comprise a third of the movie.

“How would I show this act—so simple, so beautiful, so banal, so extraordinary—without becoming a ‘Peeping Tom’ or becoming a cliché of artistic haze?” he considered at the time.

“We are so afraid of this act, so ashamed of it, that we do all we can to hide it,” he continued. “We turn out the lights, we close our eyes, and we pan towards the window. We don’t see the love we’re doing. I wanted to show this carnal passion as part of common life.”

To make his actors comfortable with the scenes, Annaud waited to film them on a Paris soundstage at the end of the shoot, hoping by then March and Leung would have gotten to know one another and become comfortable together. The director was determined to get close to the actors during this time, to capture “the honesty of their flesh.”

Nevertheless, Annaud and the actors were still “petrified” before shooting the sex scenes. “We were shaking,” he recalled. “Our hope was that people would buy it. Now, when I am asked the question, ‘did they or didn’t they?’ I think it is a great compliment to my actors.”

“This extraordinary intimacy between the girl and her Chinese lover enabled me to talk about the legitimacy of desire, the marvel of pleasure, the abandoning of oneself to the flesh and, ultimately, the consequences of that pleasure and the pain of love.”

Twenty-two years later

Annaud, March and Leung achieved their goals. The Lover stands the test of time. It is a look at one young girl’s sexual awakening, presented beautifully, and relying on intelligence in its depiction, not exploitation. Whether during the 1920, ’30 or today, each and every individual goes through their own sexual awakening in their own way. It’s a simple fact of the human condition. The Lover addresses this in a profound way, while also touching upon such important topics as class and prejudice.

Throughout the course of world cinema, sex and nudity has been used for many reasons—although most prominently for exploitation purposes. Then there are films like The Lover, where it is the story and characters that are important, with the erotica integral to both. The Lover is a forgotten film definitely worth finding or rediscovering.