Word: annaud
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DIRECTOR: JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD...
WRITERS: GERARD BRACH AND JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD...
...nymphet is a vamp in The Lover (L'Amant), Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of the Marguerite Duras best seller. With its carnal couplings and a hint of hard core, the film was a Hollywood-size hit in France. Annaud also took some flak: for shooting a very French conte d'amour in English; for choosing pouty English actress Jane March as the girl; and mostly for rejecting Duras's script in favor of one by Gerard Brach. (Duras then wrote a new version of her story, The North China Lover, in the elliptical, present- tense style of a screenplay...
...Annaud at first seems an odd choice for director. The variety of landscapes and eras in his Quest for Fire, The Name of the Rose and The Bear suggests he is less an auteur than an explorer. And one with an imperialist bent: he pumps this intimate memoir into a David Lean-size epic. But once Annaud locks his movie in the dark bedroom, he finds metaphors of gesture for convulsive passions; he creates cliff-hanging drama from each shift of the girl's whim...
...Annaud trusts Duras's words -- the book's famous final declaration of passion fulfilled and love unrequited -- so that this tale of two people at their pleasures achieves the gravity of a medieval myth. Lionel Trilling wrote that Lolita was "not about sex, but about love." The Lover, on page and screen, is not about fornication; it is about fidelity, when an obsession becomes a religion...