“15才の私。愛、心に痛い。”
1920年代、当時フランス領だったインドシナが舞台。富豪の中国人青年とその愛人である15歳のフランス人少女との間に芽生えた、許されない恋を描く。究極なまでに美しいラブ・ロマンス。
興行収入: $5,013,090 (8億円)
※製作費・興行収入はTMDBのデータを参照しています。収支は(興行収入 - 製作費)で算出したFindKey独自の推定値であり、広告宣伝費や諸経費は含まれません (1ドル=150円換算)。
A wealthy man (Tony Leung) is travelling on a ferry when he encounters a pretty young woman (Jane March). It doesn't take long before they are having a fairly torrid affair, but things are difficult. He is older and a Chinese citizen, she a French girl in what was then French Indo-China. She is also a bit of a gold-digger and quite aware that if she plays her cards right, he can offer her a new, more prosperous, life than that she shares with her mother (Fréderique Meininger) and two brothers. The older brother (Arnaud Giovaninetti) is a bit puritanical when it comes to his sister, her younger (Melvil Poupaud) is more shy and usually content to keep his head down and play his piano. Despite the initially venal nature of her relationship, there gradually develops a bond that is both loving and turbulent as the political situation overtakes their love, with the French leaving Vietnam to local government. This is a well scored and stunning looking film but the story is remarkably thin and repetitive and once we've seen them have sex a few times, I began to wonder if Jean-Jacques Annaud was just a bit bereft of ideas as to how to develop either character beyond the physical or material. It's a slow burn and I'm afraid that I just didn't really engage with either as the story trundled along, narrated occasionally and rather melodramatically by Jeanne Moreau, to a conclusion that was quite a long time coming and not really worth the wait. It's watchable, and illustrates well the gap between rich and poor here in the 1920s, but is very much an example of style over substance.
