The Indochina syndrome.

In the US, « Vietnam film » means « war drama », in France, « piece of nostalgia ».

In 1991, Régis Wargnier’s « Indochine » set its goal on being both nostalgic and epic : Hollywood top-tier entertainment with French style.

Size mattered creatively and financially : a huge money gamble by Gallic standards, one hundred and sixty minutes of old-fashioned movie-making, a must see producer’s rather than director’s film, a heavy duty vehicle powered by France’s only undisputed international star : Catherine Deneuve.

On a background of political turmoil for independence, rubber plantation owner’s Deneuve falls for the same dashing young officer, Vincent Perez, as her Vietnamese adopted daughter, Dan Pham Linh.

Movie is neither good, nor bad enough for its own sake : the average effort of a dedicated but nervy student with too many eyes on the jury and too few in the camera lens.

Film never gathers enough speed to take off : epic remains pedestrian, melodrama a model of French moderation.

Deneuve is too old for her part. Her couple with Vincent Perez is contrived. If she were older and her daughter younger, Perez might be suspect of both gerontophilia and pedophilia, but the film does not aim for bad taste and controversy.

It also does not move into kitsch territory with the hope to reach cult status : aging Deneuve remains too beautiful to match the pathetic silliness of Michael Douglas in « Basic instinct ».

As an incentive for her to graduate to more mature roles or by sheer bitchiness, her French cinema colleagues awarded her a Best Actress César.

In the acting department, film’s pleasures come from supporting parts : Jean Yanne, as a police officer, and healthily vulgar Dominique Blanc.

The whole film appears as constrained as the set programme of an ice skating championship. In its try to emulate Hollywood style film making, it seems to have bitten more than it could chew : an initial foray in the major leagues, ending in a failed but profitable experience, due to lack of know how and much money, but not enough.

An enormous machine, so complex that the crew was too busy monitoring its technical challenges to be bothered with creative issues.

A financial risk so high that the story was scared to depart, even fleetingly, from the middle of the road and lose a couple of potential viewers.

A producer’s film handled with so much care by director Régis Wargnier that his touch is barely visible : the uneasy work of a coach under the scrutiny of a team owner quick to second guess him ; in 1997, the film producer, Eric Heumann would appoint himself director for « Port Djema ».

So much a producer’s film as to become nobody’s film, and certainly not the screenwriters’.

The writing process was advertised as totally American, a significant departure from traditional French project development, and hyped as a major selling point in the marketing of the film : like a certification standard, Hollywood rules guaranteed the quality of the end product.

The film was therefore great because the script was great. The script was great because it had cost a lot of money. It had cost a lot of money because no less than four writers had been hired ; among them, Erik Orsenna, a former Président Mitterrand’s cultural aide and winner of the 1988 Prix Goncourt for « L’exposition coloniale », and Louis Gardel, whose « Fort Saganne », the 1980 recipient of Prix de l’Académie Française, was filmed by Alain Corneau in 1984.

Above all, the script was great, because the writers had worked so hard : there had been no less than six ? seven ? eight ? more ? rewrites.

Rather than a measure of story problems, the number of rewrites came to symbolise the project relentless quest for perfection. Simenon would have laughed. Maybe Flaubert would not have, but his novels were never rewritten by committee.

Short of reading all script versions, it is impossible to decide whether it got better or worse over time. Nevertheless, if the film is faithful to the shooting script, it looks like the four co-writers successfully kept in check each other’s creativity or practised self-censorship for fear of their colleagues’ criticisms.

The final movie achieves the level of formulaic impersonality probably associated in the writers’ and producer’s minds with the « made in Hollywood » quality stamp. If the early drafts contained anything of interest, it was buried with professional expertise under the many layers of writing and rewriting and gave way to a tasteless polish.

Ten years after « Le dernier métro », « qualité française » struck again after an ill-inspired detour by Hollywood cheaper backlots.

Being imitated poorly is doubly flattering : « Indochine » won the 1992 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.