Indochine (1992) - Magnificent Deneuve in Wargnier's picturesque colonial epic

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Co-star Catherine Deneuve marching in a red dress and a flowery hat in front of poor locals in South East Asia in front of a temple makes up this poster for Régis Wargnier's Indochine

A beautiful Frenchwoman with an enormous rubber plantation in colonial French Indochina (Vietnam today) gets drama in her life, when she falls for a French naval officer and starts to feel her colony falling apart around her.

Indochine is written by Catherine Cohen (The Woman of My Life/La Femme de Ma Vie (1986)), Louis Gardel (Himalaya (1999)), Erik Orsenna (La Dette (2000, TV movie)) and co-writer/director Régis Wargnier (The Woman of My Life/La Femme de Ma Vie (1986)).

Catherine Deneuve (Place Vendôme (1998)) is fabulously beautiful and her acting is an enormous pleasure in the lead, paired here with an almost equally photogenic Vincent Perez (Fanfan (2003)) as the officer, who starts out with setting fire to a boat with a heroin-smuggling father and his little boy, but who later gains understanding and sympathy for the hardships of the locals, - mainly because he also falls in love with Deneuve's adopted daughter!

The impressive production is enamored with the foreign landscapes and presents beautiful costumes, hair and faces and in this the Wargnier commits the crime of beautifying the story. Indochine is at times a compelling drama, though at others it is a bit static, and the film is overlong.

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 120 mil. FRF, approximately 4.3 mil. $

Box office: Reportedly 29.6 mil. $

= Huge hit (returned 6.88 times its cost)

[Indochine was released 15 April (France) and runs 159 minutes. 14 companies and support bodies collaborated in the financing and production of the film. Deneuve was paid 2.7 mil. FRF (approximately 513k $) for her performance in the film). Shooting took place from April - August 1991 in Malaysia, Vietnam and in Paris, France. The film sold 3.1 mil. tickets in France, where it was the 6th highest attended of the year, and it made 5.6 mil. $ in North America. Wikipedia lists the impressive 29.6 mil. $ total gross, linking to JPBox-Office, but the figure is not visible on the link, although it is not unlikely. The film was nominated for 2 Oscars, winning for Best Foreign Language Film. It lost Best Actress (Deneuve) to Emma Thompson for Howards End. It was also nominated for a BAFTA and won 5/12 César award nominations as well as a Goya, a Golden Globe and 2 National Board of Review awards, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave it a 2.5/4 star review, equal in rating to this one. Wargnier returned with A French Woman/Une Femme Française (1995). Deneuve returned in My Favorite Season/Ma Saison Préférée (1993); Perez in Cendre d'Or (1992, short) and theatrically in Fanfan (1993). Indochine is fresh at 74 % with a 6.30/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Indochine?

The Scent of Green Papaya/Mùi đu đủ Xanh/L'Odeur de la Papaye Verte (1993) - Hung's debut is pure visual poetry

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+ Best Vietnamese Movie of the Year

Man San Lu looks probingly at us on the poster for Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya

QUICK REVIEW:

We follow the maid Mui, who lives with a Vietnamese merchant family in Saigon in 1951, as a tragedy disrupts them. Ten years later the now beautiful young woman Mui becomes the bone of contention between her masters.

Dialog is switched out for reticence and lyrical communication, beautiful Chopin as well as original compositions, by Tiêt Tôn-Thât (The Buffalo Boy/Mùa Len Trâu (2004)), mixed with the sounds of the important garden in the film. Green Papaya is a sensual and beautiful, quiet film in naturally radiant colors.
One reservation: The film's obsession with ants is a little excessive.
Green Papaya is the debut feature of great Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (Cyclo/Xích Lô (1995)). His wife Tran Nu Yên-Khê (Cyclo) portrays the older Mui.

 

Related post:

 

1993 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Watch the American trailer for the film here

Cost: Reportedly 18 mil. francs, equal to approximately 3.3 mil. $
Box office: 1.7 - 1.9 mil. $ (North America only)
= Unknown
[The film was shot entirely on a soundstage in Boulogne, France. It won the Camera d'Or and the 'Award of the Youth French Film' at Cannes as well as the César (French Oscar) award for Best First Work, and was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, which it lost to the great crowdpleaser Belle Epoque (1992). Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect 4 star review. Its world gross is unfortunately not out, but with its base in France, where art films are seen more widely than in most other countries, the film could well have been a box office success. It is fresh at 100 % with an 8.1 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The Scent of Green Papaya?

The Deer Hunter (1978) - Cimino's great, colossal Vietnam epic

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A praise-stressing, unusual and exciting poster for Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter

QUICK REVIEW:

Three American steelworkers and their trials before and after their service in the Vietnam War.

Deer Hunter is a great war drama epic. But its all-pervading director Michael Cimino (Year of the Dragon (1985)) is no Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West/C'era una Volta il West (1968)), meaning; he's no master of the epic, and Deer Hunter is ultimately too loosely edited (by Peter Zinner (The Godfather: Part II (1974)), who nevertheless won an Oscar for his job), which is no doubt Cimino's own fault, as he did everything in his power to keep it as long as possible. (It runs 183 minutes.) - Perhaps Deer Hunter is a precursor of his fatal eruption of megalomania on his following western epic, Heaven's Gate (1980), which, infamously, bankrupted its studio United Artists.
Robert De Niro (Casino (1995)) and Christopher Walken (A Late Quartet (2012)), who won his only Oscar to date for his supporting performance, are both eminent in this film, and Stanley Myers' (A Severed Head (1970)) somewhat under-appreciated score is beautiful.
Deer Hunter, written by Deric Washburne (Extreme Prejudice (1987)), tackles its taboo (at the time) topic of the US Vietnam War in an all-together different way from Francis Ford Coppola's soon following Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979)): Deer Hunter is a more social-realistic portrait that also inhabits symbolism (like the controversial Russian roulette scenes that are a part of the film, because it is based on a script about Russian roulette in Las Vegas, not because Russian roulette war known to have been a widespread practice in the Vietnam War), whereas Apocalypse is a doomsday-themed journey into the dark pits of man's soul. Though I think Coppola's film is superior among the two, The Deer Hunter is certainly also a great film. - As well as a very controversial and disputed film, both from a production and a public standpoint, as you can read about in its lengthy, interesting Wikipedia page here.

Related review:

Apocalypse Now (1979) redux version - The horror of war 

Christopher Walken in a pivotal scene from Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter

An original trailer for the film that punches its greatness in your face again, again ... and again

Cost: 15 mil. $
Box office: 48.9 mil. $ (US only)
= Box office success
[Deer Hunter was budgeted at 8.5 mil. $ and ran over budget less than halfway through its production, (already during the wedding scenes, which were filmed first.) The whole film was shot on locations in Ohio, Washington, West Virginia and in Thailand. The box office reports about Deer Hunter's performance are, as many things about the film's inception and making, mixed. Despite the film's success in the US, (after a very lengthy run, ending in the end of 1980), it seems to have been well-received in other countries as well, as in Spain, where 2.2 mil. people paid admission. The film won 5 Oscars, (also for Best Director, Picture and Sound) out of 9 nominations, but was also protested against by red block nations and liberals like Jane Fonda because of its somewhat one-sided portrayal of the Vietnamese.]

What do you think of The Deer Hunter?

Apocalypse Now (1979, redux version) - Coppola's dizzying whirlpool epic of the horror of war

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An all-time great in poster art; this evocative, dark work full of depth and atmosphere by Bob Peak and Tom Jung for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now

Vietnam War-traumatized US Captain Willard receives a new mission: Sail up a Vietnamese river into Cambodia during the flaming grandeur of the Vietnam War and terminate an insane, rogue US colonel by the name of Kurtz. With "extreme prejudice."

An adaptation of Joseph Conrad's (Victory (1915)) classic masterpiece novella, Heart of Darkness (1899) written by John Millius (Red Dawn (1984)), Michael Herr (Full Metal Jacket (1987)) writing narration and Michigander master filmmaker and in this case co-writer/producer/director/co-composer Francis Ford Coppola (Tonight for Sure (1962)) changed a lot of Conrad's dark story to fit it into their current Vietnam perspective, (it originally takes place on a river in the Congo.) This is a review of the 2001-released 49-minute extended Redux-version of Apocalypse Now.
From being a story more exclusively about the darkness in the human soul, it grows in their hands into a horrifying Vietnam-tale, and a forecast of the apocalypse of the entire American system, its way of thought, or of the war effort in Vietnam at the very least, depending on the interpreter. A moral and human apocalypse of endless proportions.
Most of all, though, it still concerns itself with the savage, the uncontrollable, and the evil; the indefinable and incurable darkness in man.
Right from the first shot of helicopters rising in a cloud of napalm to the doomed sounds of The Doors' The End, the movie spellbinds its viewer in visual and sheer scope-of-production awe, fascination, and transformative despair.
Martin Sheen (The 3 Wise Men (2003, voice)) and Marlon Brando (The Formula (1980)) are majestic, and we have the sense all through the film that we so deserve this apocalypse that we are witnessing the journey towards.
The incredible near 300 day-shooting of the film in the civil war-plagued Philippines at the time with Sheen suffering a heart attack, choppers loaned directly from war there, Brando's troubling obesity, mumbling and refusal to prepare, tropical, disastrous storms, deaths, near-insanity and everything in between are portrayed by Coppola's wife Eleanor Coppola (Paris Can Wait (2016)), in her Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), a great and very recommendable documentary on extreme filmmaking.
Apocalypse Now may be the best war movie ever made, and it is arguably one of the greatest 10 or 20 films of all time. An incredible achievement and experience that is never forgotten.

Related posts:

Francis Ford Coppola: Twixt (2011) - Coppola's dreamlike Gothic is a late-night gem

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) - Coppola goes for the jugular with unsubtle, overlong adaptation

Top 10: The best adaptations reviewed by Film Excess to date

Dementia 13/The Haunted and the Hunted (1963) - Coppola's gothic AIP castle horror 
 

Watch a teaser for the film here

Budget: 31.5 mil. $
Box office: 150 mil. $ + 12.5 mil. $ (Redux)
= Big hit (returned 5.15 times the cost)
[Apocalypse Now premiered 19 May (Cannes Film Festival, France, in competition) and runs 153 minutes/202 minutes (Redux version). Coppola paid Milius 15k $ to write the screenplay, which he finished a first draft for in '69. He eventually reportedly wrote10 drafts, more than 1,000 pages. George Lucas was engaged to direct for a period, and had in mind a low-budget approach, but was overtaken by work on Star Wars. Instead Coppola himself took the helm with a budget of 12-14 mil. $. He personally dined with the dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos to arrange the use of his country's military in the long Philippine shoot. Several stars turned down offers to play Willard due to the long jungle shoot. Brando was contracted for 1 months shooting for outrageous 3.5 mil. $. Harvey Keitel started out playing Willard, but Coppola was unhappy with him and replaced him with Sheen. Shooting took place in the Philippines and in California from March 1976 - May 1977. The budget ballooned during the enormously long production, which suffered countless problems. Editing took 2 years. The film won the Palm d'Or in Cannes together with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum. It was nominated for 8 Oscars, winning for Best Cinematogrpahy (Vittorio Storaro (Caravaggio (2007, TV movie))) and Best Sound, losing Best Supporting Actor (Duvall) to Melvyn Douglas in Being There, Art/Set Decoration to All That Jazz, Director to Robert Benton for Kramer vs. Kramer, Editing to All That Jazz, Picture and Adapted Screenplay to Kramer vs. Kramer. It won 3/4 Golden Globe nominations, 2/9 BAFTA noms, a César award nomination, won a David di Donatello award, a Grammy nomination, a National Board of Review award and other honors. It grossed 78 mil. $ domestically (52 % of the total gross). Roger Ebert has called it the finest war film ever made and given it a 4/4 star review, equal to its rating here. It was nominated for  The 2001 Redux release added 12.5 mil. $ to the total gross. It currently sits at #49 on IMDb's user-generated Top 250, between The Prestige (2006) and Memento (2000). Coppola returned with One from the Heart (1981). Sheen returned in Blind Ambition (1979, miniseries) and theatrically in Eagle's Wing (1979), Duvall in The Great Santini (1979), and Brando in The Formula (1980). Apocalypse Now is certified fresh at 93 % with a 7.8/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

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