The following day, he waits for her outside her boarding school and takes her to the room in the Chinese quarter that he uses for entertaining mistresses. During the drive he tremulously takes her hand at the end, his hand is in her lap. In voice-over at the beginning of the film she says she is 15, but she tells him she is 17 he is 32. After some awkward conversation, she accepts a lift to Saigon in his chauffeur-driven limousine. He has the look but lacks the self-assurance of the playboy he fancies himself to be, and he is mesmerized the first time he sees her standing by the rail on a crowded ferry crossing the Mekong River.
He is the son of a businessman whose fortune was made in real estate, and has recently returned from Paris after finishing his business studies. The girl meets the Chinese Man when crossing the river on the ferry to return to the city after a school holiday. The girl is a loner but an excellent student, who dreams of being a writer. There is a violent, opium-smoking older brother, and a timid younger brother. Her weak-willed, widowed mother is a schoolteacher to local children. The daughter of a bitter, fearful, poverty-stricken French family, living in a rural area, the girl is a pretty waif who wears an old linen dress and a fedora, and paints her lips bright red when out of her mother's sight. The primary characters are known only as The Young Girl and The Chinese Man. Overall, the film's performances and cinematography were generally praised. The film was a box office success, and received mostly positive reviews from the general audience along with mostly negative reviews from American critics. At the 1993 César Awards in France, the film was nominated for seven awards, and won the Award for Best Original Music. The film was nominated for the 1992 Academy Award for Best Cinematography and won the Motion Picture Sound Editors' 1993 Golden Reel Award for "Best Sound Editing - Foreign Feature". The film made its theatrical debut on 22 January 1992 in France, with an English release in the United Kingdom in June and in the United States on 30 October of the same year. Production began in 1989, with filming commencing in 1991.
The film also features Jeanne Moreau as narrator. Her lover is portrayed by actor Tony Leung Ka-fai. In the screenplay written by Annaud and Gérard Brach, the 15½ year-old protagonist is portrayed by actress Jane March, who turned eighteen shortly after filming began. Based on the semi-autobiographical 1984 novel of the same name by Marguerite Duras, the film details the illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 French Indochina. The Lover ( French: L'Amant) is a 1992 romantic drama film produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
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