Saigon, Mon Amour

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: THE LOVER

DIRECTOR: JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD

WRITERS: GERARD BRACH AND JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD

THE BOTTOM LINE: In this humid version of Marguerite Duras's memoir, the most dangerous part of sex is love.

OUTSIDE, ON THE STREETS, THE Saigon of the 1920s bustles. Inside, a 15-year- old French girl and a Chinese man begin a bedroom pas de deux. Her back arches as prettily as the chords in the lush background music. His buttocks tense as his passion surges. He kisses her; she permits it. He murmurs, "I love you." She claims to feel . . . nothing.

The nymphet is a vamp in The Lover (L'Amant), Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of the Marguerite Duras best seller. With its carnal couplings and a hint of hard core, the film was a Hollywood-size hit in France. Annaud also took some flak: for shooting a very French conte d'amour in English; for choosing pouty English actress Jane March as the girl; and mostly for rejecting Duras's script in favor of one by Gerard Brach. (Duras then wrote a new version of her story, The North China Lover, in the elliptical, present- tense style of a screenplay.) Shorn of the more explicit scenes, The Lover has arrived here to see whether Americans, whose response to Madonna's latest antics is outrage or ennui, will take a fancy to its statelier steam.

This film, like Duras's script for the 1959 Hiroshima Mon Amour, is a rueful East-West romance dredged from the writer's life. This no-name affair is a last tango in Saigon -- but with the man in thrall, not in control. The girl, who insists she is having sex only because the money her lover gives her helps support her family, knows the stronger partner is always the one who loves less. The man (Tony Leung, a wonderful Hong Kong actor) is singed, happily, by the flame of his ardor. His naked vulnerability is just one of the gifts he is eager to bestow. She can swallow his pride, his ego, his love and longing. He , is hers to do with as she will, now and forever.

Annaud at first seems an odd choice for director. The variety of landscapes and eras in his Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose and The Bear suggests he is less an auteur than an explorer. And one with an imperialist bent: he pumps this intimate memoir into a David Lean-size epic. But once Annaud locks his movie in the dark bedroom, he finds metaphors of gesture for convulsive passions; he creates cliff-hanging drama from each shift of the girl's whim.

And at the end, Annaud trusts Duras's words -- the book's famous final declaration of passion fulfilled and love unrequited -- so that this tale of two people at their pleasures achieves the gravity of a medieval myth. Lionel Trilling wrote that Lolita was "not about sex, but about love." The Lover, on page and screen, is not about fornication; it is about fidelity, when an obsession becomes a religion.