Review movies: The Sea Wall | Rithy Panh | colonialism | Isabelle Huppert

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 19 November 2009

Family high and dry as colonialism sinks

THE SEA WALL
Directed by Rithy Panh
Certificate TBC

OUR story starts with a high tide. A seawall protecting a rice paddy collapses. Briny water flows in, and a crop is ruined.
As land workers stand leaning on their hoes, a flapping, tall figure of a European woman comes striding along raised earth banks: the flood has destroyed her farm, her livelihood, and any prospects she had of doing what she considers to be the most important thing in the world: leaving something of value for her son and daughter in their adopted country.
The woman is the recently bereaved wife (Isabelle Huppert) of a colonial civil servant, struggling to bring up her 19-year-old son Joseph (Gaspard Ulliel) and daughter Suzanne (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) in a tiny French outpost in a world where the sun is beginning to finally set on colonialism.
This film was adapted from a novel by Marguerite Duras, who had drawn on her experience as a young woman in Indochina in the 1930s. Duras was propositioned by the son of a rich Vietnamese businessman. She and her family had to confront the lure of material wealth that would follow if she gave herself to her suitor and the fact her hormonal desires made the attention attractive. This was then pitted against the strictures of what colonial society would find acceptable.
George Orwell wrote of the effect being a member of the colonial classes has on the soul – he came home after five years in Burma a broken man.
He said he was worn down by knowing at all times you were an unwelcome guest in someone else’s country, and forced to act like a bully. This sense is constantly lurking in every shot, underlined by the plot unfolding to show the growing creep of land grabs. It ratchets up tensions between the French rulers and the land workers around them, and again leaves you with a sense that something evil is bubbling away in this unjust society.
There is a lovely feel to the film, from the shots of the water buffalo, to the toned torso and handsome looks of Joseph, the scratchy gramophone in the colonial watering hole Chez Bart to the white suits and car of the Vietnamese suitor who throws Suzanne’s mother’s life into such a quandary.

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