((link)) Full Movie | The Lover 1992

He takes her hand. He doesn’t kiss it; he holds it, then places it against his cheek. He is shaking. "You're so young," he murmurs. She says nothing. The ferry docks. He asks, "Do you want to go to Cholon?" Cholon is Saigon’s Chinese quarter, a labyrinth of narrow streets, opium dens, and shuttered rooms. She knows what he is asking. She says yes.

Her family, their fortunes no better, decides to return to France. They book passage on a steamer. The girl will go back to the metropole, back to a country she has never known. On the last day, she waits for the black limousine. It doesn’t come. He has chosen to stay away.

It is him. His voice, older now, still hesitant, still that same whisper. He tells her that he has never forgotten her. He tells her that he has loved her every single day since they parted. He tells her that the love he feels for her has not faded, even after all the years, even after his marriage, his children, his empire. He says, simply, "I am still the same. I am still in love with you." the lover 1992 full movie

The ship is at sea. The night is black, the ocean vast. In the darkness of her cabin, the girl hears a piano playing a nocturne—Chopin, a waltz. The music drifts across the water from the ship’s salon.

On a rickety ferry chugging across that river, a young French girl stands alone. She is fifteen—though she looks older, or perhaps younger, in her frayed cotton dress and a pair of worn, gold-sequined high heels that are too grown-up for her. Her name is never spoken in the film. She is simply the girl . She wears a man’s fedora, a soft, pinkish-beige, pulled down over her eyes. It is a defiant act, a costume of poverty trying to pass as bohemian chic. She is returning by bus from her boarding school in the countryside to her family’s decaying villa in Saigon. He takes her hand

On the pier, the enormous ship’s horn blasts. The girl stands at the rail, watching the crowd of Saigon shrink into a smudge on the horizon. She is alone. She feels a strange, distant ache she cannot name.

Afterwards, he tells her that he is afraid to love her. She tells him she doesn’t want him to love her. She wants him to do to her as he would with any other woman he brings to this room. A bargain is struck, though never spoken aloud: He will pay for her body, and in return, she will give him the illusion of possession. He gives her money for a taxi back to the boarding school. She takes it without hesitation. "You're so young," he murmurs

The girl’s home life is a slow-motion disaster. Her mother, a former schoolteacher, is broken and bitter after a failed land investment. She dotes on her elder son, a violent, drug-addicted wastrel who steals from her and terrorizes the household. The younger brother is a weak, pale shadow. The girl is an afterthought, a burden.