A family tale from colonial Cambodia

By Steven Rea

Inquirer Movie Columnist and Critic

Isabelle Huppert looks thin and tired, but appropriately so, in The Sea Wall, an affecting flashback to French colonial Cambodia and a widow's struggle to guard her house, land, and family against forces of nature and human greed.

Loosely based on Marguerite Duras' autobiographical novel of her adolescence in French Indochina, The Sea Wall is not an epic on the scale of Indochine. Rather, this circa-1930 drama offers a sumptuously photographed but brittle portrait of a mother and her two (almost) grown children: Joseph (Gaspard Ulliel), a swaggering 19-year-old, and Suzanne (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). It is Suzanne, a 16-year-old beauty courted by a wealthy Chinese businessman, who represents the young Duras.

Mr. Rithy Panh.

Directed by the Cambodian-born, Paris-based Rithy Panh, The Sea Wall portrays Huppert as a proud matriarch with a mercenary streak who tries to barter off her daughter in an effort to save her rice plantation from foreclosure. If the relationship between Suzanne and the Chinese tycoon Mr. Jo (Randal Douc) has a deja vu vibe, that's because Jean-Jacques Annaud already devoted an entire film, 1992's The Lover, to the sexual initiation of Duras' alter-ego.

The Sea Wall, with its dysfunctional family (and intimations of incest), explodes the moral flaws at the heart of European expansionism. At the same time, the film - and Huppert at its center - bracingly dissects a woman's desperate emotional state.