Outside the train station of Marseille, through which many a Frenchman left for the colonies, stands a 19th-century statue allegorically depicting Indochina as three half-naked girls lounging in the tropical sun. It's the perfect encapsulation of the colonial stereotype that South East Asian women are childlike, naive and sensual. The statue tells you more about the men who commissioned it - men who probably never set foot in the colonies - than about the realities of French Indochina.<br /><br />Cut to 1992 and here's a French movie about Vietnam in which the only major Vietnamese character is, you guessed it, a childlike, naive and sensual young girl. If it wasn't that this movie was to a large extent shot in Vietnam, you'd think the makers never set foot there: this is a movie set on plantations, in gambling halls and opium-dens, a catalogue of colonial clichés.<br /><br />The story, such as it is, involves a French plantation holder (Catherine Deneuve) and her adoptive daughter, a Vietnamese royal (Linh Dan Pham) growing apart during the anti-French uprising. Taken as a metaphor for colonialism, the adoptive-daughter-angle is beyond patronizing (I much prefer Graham Greene's morality play of The Quiet American: Vietnam as a whore being fought over by an old European and a young American).<br /><br />Sure, the makers feel obliged to take a stand against colonialism, but the content is betrayed by the prettiness of their images. It's hard to take serious the message of a movie in which Vietnamese princesses elope with dashing young French officers and sail a dhow through Ha Long Bay, Vietnam's most scenic tourist spot. This movie is so busy wallowing in the nostalgia of a lost and largely imagined past that it makes any pro-independence stance null and void.<br /><br />Even the downtrodden masses look picturesque.