Vietnam

In colonial Saigon, a schoolgirl in a man’s fedora meets a rich Chinese heir—and a reckless affair turns heat, money and prejudice into heartbreak. Set in 1929 and drawn from Marguerite Duras’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Lover follows an unnamed fifteen-year-old French girl returning to her Saigon boarding school after the holidays. Her widowed mother has squandered the family savings on useless farmland, her bullying elder brother is an opium-addicted parasite, and her vulnerable younger...