The Sea Wall(Un barrage contre le Pacifique)

Duras’ novel The Lover may be her bestknown work, but its French Indochina story of coming of age, infatuation and entitlement first took shape decades earlier in her book The Sea Wall. For his adaptation of that work, Rithy Panh charts Duras’ early 1930s tale of a standoffish teenage French girl’s encounters with a love-struck rich Asian man. But Panh, cinema’s foremost chronicler of traumatic Cambodian history, finds much to note in Duras’ picture of wider society too. Here the stymied lust pieces into rising tensions, where colonial authorities and opportunist elites sow mistrust and anger across the population.