The Lover.

Jean-Jacques Annaud proved himself a master filmmaker with his very first feature, the superb Black and White in Color. Although his next, Coup de tete, was worthy, too, he then veered into big, Hollywood-oriented films, meant somehow to combine the classy with the audience-coddling. Of these, Quest for Fire was the best, The Name of the Rose the worst. Now Annaud has adapted (with Gerard Brach) an even much sleazier international bestseller than Umberto Eco's: the insufferable Marguerite Duras's allegedly autobiographical The Lover.

This is the tale of the fifteenish Young Girl's getting involved with a rich thirty-something Chinese merchant, though she hates the Chinese in Indochina, where her impoverished widowed mother and two brothers are stuck. The daring, doomed clandestine affair will have to end when the girl's family returns to France, or even sooner, when the businessman will have to marry an equally wealthy Chinese girl in a prearranged, loveless match. The movie, like the novel, contains some interesting insights into cultural differences, and the feel of life in prewar Saigon and environs is persuasively re-created in situ. But this remains a piece of queasy erotica in which the now old, ugly, and egomaniacal Duras narcissistically exalts her youthful self.

Annaud made the film in English, with an eye to the box office. He cast as the Young Girl the sultrily sullen nymphet-like Jane March, who, with the help of creditable acting and five body doubles, manages to be quite a hot little number. The Hong Kong action-movie star Tony Leung, with only two body doubles and dubbed by a more high-class British voice, is less appealing. People whose own fantasies tap into The Lover's central situation involving a secret apartment for torrid yet seemingly affectless trysts-- may enjoy this; others won't.

The minor characters are, as in the novel, preposterous caricatures; the once great Jeanne Moreau supplies the narration (in good English, the language of her mother, though even she trips up on the word recognize, a veritable pons asinorum for foreigners); her voice, however, sounds even older than the old Duras's it is supposed to represent. Ah no, Annaud!