Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on various players.
I’m not sure what it is about an epic that makes me a little bit cockeyed going in. Sure, there are epic films that I love. Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, is a true classic, and I’m a huge fan of The Bridge on the River Kwai. But many epics seem to get to that point by some means of unnecessary bloating and padding. You may also notice that the two epics I’ve said I’m a fan of are specifically epics that have no real romance plot or subplot. That’s important, because the romance often seems to be the padding of choice. That’s certainly the case with Indochine.
In fact, Indochine is one of those epics that is essentially a romance set against a huge story. We’re going to get the romance that we (evidently) crave set against the full sweep of history, where the world is changing dramatically and our star-crossed lovers are caught up in those changes and both pushed together and pulled apart by forced beyond their control. I’m not saying anything here that you haven’t seen at least a dozen times. The difference is that this time, that story is happening in what used to be called Indochina (essentially Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and it’s going to be in French.
