Rating: 
Summary: One Of The Most Sexuely Graphic Films Ever Made
Review: Jean-Jacques Annaud The Lover is one of the greatest romances I have ever seen its romentic,full of passion,beutifuly photographed,brillently acted,taboo shattering,and has incridable music. This is what film is all about its a story about a 32 year old man and a 15 year old girl who have a sexuel relationship together. Thats why its so taboo for is because of the age difference not to manchen the extremely graphic love scenes and rape scenes only found in the unrated version on DVD. This film is incridable and is only for adults do to the graphic subject matter even the R rated version is bad and thats not even close to as graphic as the unrated version is. The unrated version which has ten more min of graphic sex put in to the movie. The unrated version would difenitly be rated NC-17 if it want throught the ratings bord. This is a wonderful film but for adults only. Warning: This film is unrated do to graphic sexuality,graphic sex scenes,graphic rape scenes,graphic nudity,and graphic language.This film is for adults only.
Rating:
Summary: A sensuous, erotic and touching love story
Review: "The Lover" is a gorgeously sensuous and erotic film about a young girl's awakening to love and her own sexuality. Whover categorized this movie as soft porn needs to wash his or her mind out with Lysol. It is, quite simply, a love story. Jane March plays "the young girl", a French adolescent in colonial Vietnam living with her widowed mother and two brothers. Her mother barely makes ends meet by teaching, her younger brother, with whom she has a relationship both protective and erotic, is weak and passive, and her older brother is brutally antisocial, stealing the family's few funds to support his opium habit and bullying his younger siblings through violence. The girl attends a lycee in Saigon where she and her friend are the only Caucasian pupils. On a trip from her home back to school she meets "the Chinaman" played by Tony Leung, and their encounter sets off sparks. Leung is the son of a rich overseas Chinese, engaged to marry the Chinese girl picked out by his father, who spends his own days in an opium haze; his feelings for the young girl are at first purely sexual but ripen into a love so deep it confuses and frightens him. It's a love that is doomed from the start; his father will not hear of him marrying a non-Chinese, and her family, although the equivalent of white trash, still considers themselves better than the Asians they live among. When the word of her affair with the Chinaman gets out, she becomes an outcast among her schoolmates. The young girl tries to cope with the social and emotional conflicts by convincing herself and telling him that she doesn't love him; he knows she's kidding herself and so do we, and toward the movie's end, when she has lost him forever through his marriage to the woman chosen for him by his father and her own repatriation to France, she herself realizes she is in love with him. Jane March is incredible in the role of the young girl; she brings out all her character's innocence, sexuality and adolescent confusion. Tony Leung is just right as the pampered son of a rich family who is hamstrung by the mores and traditions of his family and society; and Frederique Meininger is especially effective as the mother, who dotes on her worthless older son (the more venal she knows he is, the more she dotes on him, helpless to deal with the reality of what he is, and worse, what he will become), and condemns her daughter's relationship with a Chinese on the one hand while she has no problem taking her daughter's lover's money on the other. The cinematography is beautiful and conveys all the heat and languor of colonial Vietnam. This is no film for children; the sex scenes are as explicit as can be shown in any film not rated X. At the film's end (Jeanne Moreau does an excellent voice-over throughout the movie), when the Chinaman after decades of silence telephones the girl who is now a middle-aged woman and tells her he has never forgotten her and will love her until death, we realize how strong was the love between these two. It's a beautiful film of two people who were just right, even while they were all wrong, for each other.
Rating:
Summary: comment on this movie
Review: this movie is very romantic in a way that the age gap between the guy and the gal is not the point.one being in her teens and the other is in his manly age. they fell in love with each other.the race between the two is the bigger issue here.and also the family tension between the two due to the cultural differences.overall i loved it
Rating: 
Summary: Could've been better if not for too much of that stuff.
Review: Picture: Positive (for cinematography)
Moral rating: negative
Character: negative
I rented this movie in my search for a good foreign film.
It has great cinematography. March is very cute. But I think that is about it. I didn't realize that it had so many unnecessary (...) scenes. I think this movie would have been a better candidate for an award if it toned downed (...)[some] scenes to ones that are more fitting for a movie.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, evocative, erotic
Review: Wow, wow, wow...memories of this movie have stayed with me for years. I even recently bought the book on eBay to read the supposedly autobiographical material from which the movie was made. It's gorgeously filmed and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, as well, which doesn't hurt with a piece as erotic as this one. It's the tale of a young schoolgirl and her affair with an older Asian man in Indochina in the 20s. He becomes infatuated with her but because of issues of class can never hope to marry her, a situation which seems to be exactly to her liking. She appears to be involved strictly for the physical pleasure.
Terrific and soooo memorable. Some call this movie soft porn; well, if that's so, then I'm all for it!
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable film; very basic DVD
Review: This is one of those cases where I can't help wishing there had been more on this disc. You get the movie, with optional subtitles, and one of the theatrical trailers that had been made for it. And that's it. The movie itself is quite good. Jane March does an excellent job as the impoverished Young Girl who is suddenly given the opportunity not just to satiate her blossoming sexuality, but also to glimpse a life of wealth and to enjoy, for the first time, being in a position of power. Tony Leung is well-cast as her besmitten Chinaman who lavishes on her both sexual desire and escapes from the life she hates. The direction and camera work are admirable - we are allowed into the story without everything being thrust in our faces. The DVD transfer of the movie is beautiful. The clarity of image is so far ahead of the VHS edition that the latter is barely watchable after seeing this. But that's all there is to the disc. Considering the controversy and cultural arguments around this film, there could have been so much more: behind-the-scenes documentary, history of the film, links to the novel, director commentary, and so on.
Maybe there'll be a collector's edition eventually.
Rating:
Summary: Diffrentiating Between Sex and Love
Review: This movie has one thinking what sex and love is. Can sex and love go hand in hand? That is the question of what the movie brought to my attention. I saw this movie on an independent film channel and the character, a young girl, has an affair with an older Chinese man. Her family struggles financially. The mother is a widowed schoolteacher and her brothers are obnoxious and want to get into her personal life. She does introduce her lover to her family and he does treat them to dinner. However, what was puzzling was their relationship. Did they actually have real feelings toward one another? He was arranged to be married and there would have never been anything more between them.
This movie diffrentiates between sex and love. Is it possible to have a sex only relationship? If so, how can it last? Do emotional feelings get in the way of their relationship?
Duras was experimenting sex for the first time. It was an experience that she would carry through her adult life.
Rating:
Summary: A sensuous, erotic and touching love story
Review: "The Lover" is a gorgeously sensuous and erotic film about a young girl's awakening to love and her own sexuality. Whover categorized this movie as soft porn needs to wash his or her mind out with Lysol. It is, quite simply, a love story. Jane March plays "the young girl", a French adolescent in colonial Vietnam living with her widowed mother and two brothers. Her mother barely makes ends meet by teaching, her younger brother, with whom she has a relationship both protective and erotic, is weak and passive, and her older brother is brutally antisocial, stealing the family's few funds to support his opium habit and bullying his younger siblings through violence. The girl attends a lycee in Saigon where she and her friend are the only Caucasian pupils. On a trip from her home back to school she meets "the Chinaman" played by Tony Leung, and their encounter sets off sparks. Leung is the son of a rich overseas Chinese, engaged to marry the Chinese girl picked out by his father, who spends his own days in an opium haze; his feelings for the young girl are at first purely sexual but ripen into a love so deep it confuses and frightens him. It's a love that is doomed from the start; his father will not hear of him marrying a non-Chinese, and her family, although the equivalent of white trash, still considers themselves better than the Asians they live among. When the word of her affair with the Chinaman gets out, she becomes an outcast among her schoolmates. The young girl tries to cope with the social and emotional conflicts by convincing herself and telling him that she doesn't love him; he knows she's kidding herself and so do we, and toward the movie's end, when she has lost him forever through his marriage to the woman chosen for him by his father and her own repatriation to France, she herself realizes she is in love with him. Jane March is incredible in the role of the young girl; she brings out all her character's innocence, sexuality and adolescent confusion. Tony Leung is just right as the pampered son of a rich family who is hamstrung by the mores and traditions of his family and society; and Frederique Meininger is especially effective as the mother, who dotes on her worthless older son (the more venal she knows he is, the more she dotes on him, helpless to deal with the reality of what he is, and worse, what he will become), and condemns her daughter's relationship with a Chinese on the one hand while she has no problem taking her daughter's lover's money on the other. The cinematography is beautiful and conveys all the heat and languor of colonial Vietnam. This is no film for children; the sex scenes are as explicit as can be shown in any film not rated X. At the film's end (Jeanne Moreau does an excellent voice-over throughout the movie), when the Chinaman after decades of silence telephones the girl who is now a middle-aged woman and tells her he has never forgotten her and will love her until death, we realize how strong was the love between these two. It's a beautiful film of two people who were just right, even while they were all wrong, for each other.
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully made film
Review: This is a beautifully made film about a 17 year old girl that meets with an older Chinese man while going away to a private school. They have an immediate attraction. This is her first experience with men, and she tells herself it is just for the sexual part, never realizing , or admitting to herself, that she is in love with him, until he has to commit to an arranged marriage. It is very emotional tale, beautifully filmed with a look of how gorgeous Siagon was at one time. I love this film and am going to buy it!!
Rating:
Summary: L'amant simplement
Review: Most people miss the boat in viewing "The Lover." It is a semi-autobiographical novel based purely on memory of a young girl's first sexual awakening - so do not expect an effective visual translation of written words without some visual graphic description - especially when the primary focus of the novel is nuanced on physical love, in the setting of colonial oppression (France - Vietnam), social stratification (wealthy ethnic-Chinese enclave in Vietnam - poor French nationals living in colonial outposts), racial separation (native Asians - colonial Whites), then later, the realization of right-and-wrong (the mother apologizing to Tony Leung about her children's bad behaviour), and finally higher emotional love (Jane March's heart-broken scene on the ocean liner). In addition, this movie was told from an impoverished, uneducated, inexperienced, naïve, but yet elitist colonial French girl's point-of-view, in the 1920's Vietnam. (Also remember that the younger Marguerite Duras was actually more Vietnamese than French.). So...to call this movie a kiddie-porn / soft-porn in disguise is unfair - it IS about sex between a fifteen-year-old girl and a thirty-two-year-old man, no pretense here. To criticize a certain scene as "disguised rape" is unfair - it WAS rape, a perfect cinematic description sexual aggression, control, and power. Things must be kept in context of the time and place. If one were to criticize every aspect of this film, then let's not make a film about colonialism, inequality of race or wealth, or any other wrong doing in the world. And finally, how the French look at love and sex is different from many other cultures. This movie is based on a French novel (one of many versions on the same theme by Marguerite Duras), as such, there is an expectation that the audience should know the plot already, and the movie should be treated as a visual extension - or one could say, a "validation"- of their imagery when reading the novel (How would anyone know what Colonial Vietnam looked like without moving visual images on screen?). I agree that the sex scenes border on soft-porn (one cannot make a successful intellectual movie nowadays without it being filmed in English, as well as some artful sex-scene thrown in); however, it was cleverly done. And it is true that if these scenes were to be deleted from the movie, the rest would not make sense - because the novel was based on those bedroom scenes that subsequently shaped and formed Marguerite Duras's life. I recommend, if you speak French, to watch the movie in the French soundtrack. It provides a more authentic feel to the period (of course, the actors' mouths would not match the sound...but for Europeans, it is not of great detriments, as they are used to multi-culture casting.)
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