Arnaud's The Lover

Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1991 French film The Lover (L'Amant) is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by French writer Marguerite Duras dealing with her love affair with a Chinese man in his mid-30s when she was 15 and living in 1929 French-colonized Indochina. Since the movie centers on a young white girl's initiation into sex by a foreigner, a wealthy older man "of color," it is both erotic and exotic. The conflation of the two elements carries political implications, particularly if political is viewed as the complex relations between people in society, in this case a man and a woman breaking many of society's rules. Three different societies come into play here: French, Chinese, and colonized Indochina, and all three condemn the love affair.

In Kate Millet's landmark 1970 book, Sexual Politics, she argues that the relationship between the sexes has always been a political one, a continuing power struggle. Millet defines the term "politics" as "power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another" (23). The Lover should not be judged from an American point of view, but from a French one in which sex between an underage girl and an older man is not viewed as statutory rape. It still, however, represents a power relationship between two unequals, and in this sense is political. There are also political ramifications to the mixing of two different races.

The word exotic means something alien, but it also means something exciti

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She enters it for the promise of sex and money, and perhaps a chance to "get even" with her family. "The girl hates her life hates the bloody-mindedness of her teachers and fellow students, and the descent of her dysfunctional family into depravity. Of the man we learn less; he comes from a proud old family, and his bride will be selected for him according to the ancient ways" (Ebert). Both enter the affair for the excitement it offers, an emotion heightened by each acting as the exotic for the other. Race is a prominent factor in the film. The Whites act as the superior race, and the girl dominates the man by her "whiteness" as well as by sex. She thinks of herself as "the white girl," and so does her lover. Her lording her whiteness over her lover is a political act, and the emotional center of the story of two people from different cultures reaching out to each other resonates with exoticism as much as eroticism. The politics are kept in the background however, and the eroticism in the foreground in spite of the forbidden racial love content. The film is about sex in and of itself, but also about the politics of sex. The girl accepts, and asks for money from her rich lover, and convinces herself that she only sees him becaus

Category: Film - A