Indochine (1992)
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Indochine Movie Review
Indochine is a 1992 French period drama film directed by Regis Wargnier and starring Catherine Deneuve. It’s a solid and charming, but very typical flick.
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“At age ten one doesn’t know
the world needs to be changed“
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It is set in colonial French Indochina from the thirties all the way to the fifties and it follows a French woman who adopts a Vietnamese daughter and all the hardships that she endures in the years prior to Vietnam War. I did find the movie a solid history lesson and an important one even as this period was very tumultuous for the country of Vietnam.
I did like the epic elements in it and some of the romantic subplots worked really well too. The movie’s exceedingly charming, there is no denying that. It’s very sweet and absolutely epic in quality, both in terms of scope and emotion. Many scenes here are very memorable and quite emotional.
However, the movie ultimately fell prey to the typical genre trappings such as many implausible and overly soapy plot elements that were quite annoying to me personally as well as a particularly lavish approach in terms of the technical aspects that seriously overshadowed the story and especially the characterization which is quite weak.
The film features too many characters and most of them never get any proper moment to shine here. But I did absolutely love the protagonist who’s a commendable, very brave woman so well played by Catherine Deneuve in her only Oscar-nominated performances interestingly enough.
The film also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and it did not deserve it of course, but then again this year was particularly weak for foreign films and the Academy eats this stuff up so of course they were going to honor it.
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Indochine definitely does look amazing in its polished cinematography and absolutely arresting imagery. It is epic, it is gorgeous and it is also tremendously scored. It looks, sounds and feels superb, but all of those effects cannot mask a weaker story and prolonged runtime with some pacing issues here and there. It’s solid as these types of movies go, but uninspired.
Indochine is a typical foreign Oscar winner which favors style over substance. The plot is weak, sometimes sappy and the runtime is prolonged with some pacing issues. The characterization is also quite weak, but the protagonist is admirable and well played by Catherine Deneuve. The movie is sweet, charming and quite epic in terms of scope, cinematography, score and imagery, but in the end it is a standard period piece by all means.
