A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
The film moves slowly and sensually, carried by humid heat, light and silence, letting glances and touch say more than dialogue. It pairs an erotic love story with a sense of outsiderness, poverty and social boundaries in colonial Indochina. The mood stays melancholic and remembered, with a lot of visual beauty and a trace of wistfulness.
Good for you if you like quiet, erotically charged love dramas in exotic period settings and are happy to trade pace for atmosphere.
Written with AI, based on TMDb data.