Indochina

“The world is made up of things that cannot be separated: men and women, mountains and plains, humans and gods, Indochina and France”

The very title “Indochine” is nostalgic, conjuring up lost world from which the affix “French” is inseparable. Indeed, it is a film about the end of Indochina, told in the flashback from vantage point of Geneva during the conference which followed French defeat in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. The film’s historical setting, therefore, is the final period of French colonialism in what became, a divided Vietnam.

“Indochine” presents an accurate picture of French colonialism. Eliane DeVries, who was born in Vietnam, is a symbol of privilege and of the French presence. She represents a colonial paternalism, but her daughter, Camille, whom she adopted, rebels and rejects her colonial and privileged inheritance. Camille abandoned her mother and the colonial world she represents for a life of clandestine political activism. She joined the communist party which was formed and she became a symbol of Vietnamese nationalism and that anti-French sentiment which culminated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Jean-Baptiste, who also represents French colonialism, is a young French naval officer whose love for both mother and then adoptive daughter creates the tension. It is the visual presentation of Vietnam; people are unaware of the beauty of it.

The film shows the French colonialism, and it shows that the French colonizer were dominant, wealthy and exploitative. It also shows the Vietnamese peasantry, the rise of communism in Indochina, the importance of nationalism there and the Vietnamese wars against the French and Americans. And it leaves us with a clear understanding that Vietnam is more than a war. The film presents Vietnam as beautiful landscape, as an emerging nation culturally distinctive, and as people devoted to independence.

The last part, which was the time when Eliane was gazing out on a sunset over Lake Geneva, makes a beautiful but mysterious image. The sun sets on French Indochina, now safely confined to the past with a mixture of regret and acceptance of inevitability. It still lives as a dream and a nightmare, beautiful but ignoble like the human traffic which provided the labourers of Eliane’s estate. France and Indochina, inseparable at the beginning, are now estranged. (Nicholl D., Indochine)

The Southeast Asians at first were