Jane March Interview on "The Lover" (October 23, 1992)
Jane March Horwood (born 20 March 1973) is an English film actress and former model.
Early life and education
March was born Jane March Horwood in Edgware, London.[citation needed] Her father, Bernard Horwood, was a design and technology secondary school teacher of English and Spanish ancestry. Her mother, Jean, a newsagent, is Vietnamese and Chinese. March has one brother, a landscape designer.[1]
While Color of Night was in production, March began dating the film's co-producer, Carmine Zozzora. The couple married in June 1993 in an 11-minute ceremony at which Willis was the best man and Demi Moore was the maid of honour. According to Color of Night director Richard Rush, March still received many offers from Hollywood studios after the film's release, but Zozzora required the studios to also hire him as the producer for any film in which March would star, a condition most studios rejected.[5] For this reason, March did not star in more films during their marriage.[5]
March and Zozzora separated in 1997 and divorced in 2001. A few years later, March married Steven Waddington. They have one child.[6][7]
The Lover (French: L'Amant) is a 1992 erotic romantic drama film produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Based on the semi-autobiographical 1984 novel of the same name by Marguerite Duras, the film details the illicit affair between a teenage French girl and a wealthy Chinese man in 1929 French Indochina. The protagonist is portrayed by actress Jane March and her lover is portrayed by actor Tony Leung Ka-fai. The film also features Jeanne Moreau as a narrator.
Development began in 1989, with principal photography commencing in 1991. The film made its theatrical debut on 22 January 1992 in France, on 19 June in the United Kingdom, and in the United States on 30 October of the same year. The film was nominated for the 1992 Academy Award for Best Cinematography and won the Motion Picture Sound Editors' 1993 Golden Reel Award for "Best Sound Editing — Foreign Feature". It was nominated for seven César Awards in France, winning the Award for Best Original Music. The film was a box office success in France and received generally positive reviews in Europe, while reviews from American critics were more mixed.
On Rotten Tomatoes, The Lover holds a 28% approval rating based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 4.8/10.[18] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 59 out of 100, based on 25 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[19]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times praised the film, calling it "something of a triumph" and a "tough, clear-eyed, utterly unsentimental" film that was "produced lavishly but with such discipline that the exotic locale never gets in the way of the minutely detailed drama at the center." He also complimented the performances of Tony Leung and Jane March, noting she is "wonderful" and a "nymphet beauty" in her film debut.[5] The staff of Variety praised Leung's performance as well, writing that he "is excellent as the shiftless scion whose love for the girl makes him emotionally naked and vulnerable."[20] David Ansen of Newsweek wrote: "The Lover's rarefied sensibility takes getting used to; once its spell is cast, you won't want to blink."[21]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times compared the film to Emmanuelle or the Playboy and Penthouse erotic videos, "in which beautiful actors and elegant photography provide a soft-core sensuality. As an entry in that genre, The Lover is more than capable, and the movie is likely to have a long life on video as the sort of sexy entertainment that arouses but does not embarrass." He continued, "Is The Lover any good as a serious film? Not really. Annaud and his collaborators have got all of the physical details just right, but there is a failure of the imagination here; we do not sense the presence of real people behind the attractive facades of the two main actors."[22]
Desson Thomson of the Washington Post observed, "Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments...But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, Lover never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities."[23] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a grade of C, calling it "one more movie that titillates us with the prospect of taking sex seriously and then dampens our interest by taking it too seriously. Why do so many filmmakers insist on staging erotic encounters as if they were some sort of hushed religious ritual? The answer, of course, is that they're trying to dignify sex. But sex isn't dignified — it's messy and playful and abandoned. In The Lover, director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us the sweating and writhing without the spontaneity and surprise."[24]