Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Indochine
I believe that for the most part, the film “Indochine” did not defend French colonialism in Vietnam. Given the history of French presence in Vietnam, I feel like they occupied the country just so they wouldn’t be bored and so they could produce goods at the expense of cheap manual labor. I also feel like they wanted to control and run the country in a sense. In the film, Eliane owned the rubber plantation and had Vietnamese people working for her to extract it from the trees. The way in which the Vietnamese workers were treated on the plantations could be compared to black slaves in the United States picking cotton on plantations in the South. They had to do hard manual labor and you frequently saw some getting beat for misbehaving or trying to desert. I did find it interesting how Eliane “adopted” Camille (who was Vietnamese) and got her a French education (and how she spoke only French for the first part of the movie). Even the servants and the cooks in the house spoke French. It was like Eliane represented France and Camille represented Vietnam; Eliane was trying to control and in a sense, manipulate Camille to conform to French custom. One thing that is very noticeable throughout the film is how concerned the French are with the spread of communism. You see one scene where the police chief has arrested one man accused of being a communist and then he interrogates his son, who he assumes will follow in his father’s footsteps. The French are very paranoid and afraid of the communism spreading from the North that they become almost oppressive to the Vietnamese citizens. This was also due to the fact that Japan did not like the French presence in Vietnam and they were collaborating with Viet Minh to try and overthrow the colonial presence (The Viet Minh was a group of communists and Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi Minh).
After Camille found out that her mother had slept with Jean-Baptiste, a marriage was arranged between her and...