In 1930, Éliane Devries, someone born to French parents in colonial Indochina, runs her and her widowed father's rubberplantation with indentured laborers and divides her days between her homes there and outside Saigon. She is also the adoptive mother of Camille, whose birth parents were friends of Éliane's and members of the Nguyễn dynasty. Guy Asselin, the head of the French security services in Indochina, courts Éliane, who rejects him and raises Camille alone giving her the education of a privileged European through her teens.
Éliane meets young French Navy lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Le Guen when they bid on the same painting at an auction. He challenges her publicly and turns up at her plantation days later, searching for a boy whose sampan he set ablaze on suspicion of opium smuggling. Éliane and Jean-Baptiste begin an affair.
Camille meets Jean-Baptiste by chance one day when he rescues her from a prisoner escape attempt resulting from her being bloodied and knocked unconscious. Believing him to have saved her life, Camille falls in love with Jean-Baptiste, who has no inkling of Camille's relation to Éliane. After learning of Camille's love for Jean-Baptiste, Éliane uses her connections with high-ranking Navy officials to get him transferred to Haiphong. Jean-Baptiste confronts Éliane about this during a Christmas party, resulting in an argument where he slaps her in front of his fellow officers. For his transgression, Jean-Baptiste is sent to Dragon Islet (Hòn Rồng), a remote French military base in northern Indochina.
Éliane allows Camille to become engaged to Thanh, a pro-Communist Vietnamese boy expelled as a student from France because of his support for the 1930 Yên Bái mutiny. A sympathetic Thanh allows Camille to search for Jean-Baptiste up north. Traveling on foot, Camille reaches Dragon Islet and is imprisoned along with a Vietnamese family she travels with and other laborers. After seeing her traveling companions tortured and murdered by French officers, she attacks an officer and shoots him in the struggle. Jean-Baptiste defies his superiors to protect Camille in the ensuing firefight, and the two escape Dragon Islet.
After spending days adrift in the Gulf of Tonkin, Camille and Jean-Baptiste reach land and are taken in by a Communist theater troupe, who offers them refuge in a secluded valley. Months later, Camille is pregnant with Jean-Baptiste's child, but they must vacate the valley out of safety. Thanh, now a high-ranking Communist operative, arranges for the troupe to smuggle the lovers into China.
Guy attempts to use operatives to quell the growing insurrections by laborers and to locate Camille and Jean-Baptiste, without success. Camille and Jean-Baptiste's story becomes a legend in tuồng performances by Vietnamese actors, earning Camille the popular nickname "the Red Princess". When the couple nears the Chinese border, Jean-Baptiste takes his newborn son to baptize him in a river while Camille sleeps. After christening the baby Étienne, he is ambushed and apprehended by French soldiers. Camille evades capture and escapes with the troupe, while Jean-Baptiste is remanded to a Saigon jail and Étienne is handed over to Éliane.
After some days in prison, Jean-Baptiste agrees to talk if he can first see Étienne. The Navy, which has authority over the case and refuses to subject Jean-Baptiste to interrogation by the police, plans to court-martial him in Brest, France to avoid the public outcry that would arise from a trial in Indochina. Jean-Baptiste is allowed a 24-hour visitation with Étienne before being taken to France. He goes to see Éliane, who lets him stay with Étienne at her Saigon residence for the night.
The next day, Éliane finds Jean-Baptiste dead in his bed with a gunshot to his temple, a gun in hand, and an unharmed Étienne. Outraged, Éliane suspects that the police murdered him, but Guy's girlfriend says that the Communists may have done it to silence Jean-Baptiste. With no evidence sought for either suspicion, Jean-Baptiste's death is ruled a suicide. Camille is captured and sent to Poulo-Condor – a high security prison where visitors are not permitted. After five years, the Popular Front comes to power and releases all political prisoners including Camille. Éliane reunites with Camille, who declines to return to her mother and son, choosing instead to join the Communists and fight for Vietnam's independence. Camille does not wish for Étienne to know the horrors she witnessed, and tells her mother that French colonialism is drawing to an end. Taking Étienne with her, Éliane sells her plantation and leaves Indochina.
In 1954, Éliane tells her story to a grown Étienne. They have come to Switzerland, where Camille is a Vietnamese Communist Party delegate to the Geneva Conference. Étienne goes to the negotiators' hotel intending to find Camille, but it is so crowded that he is not sure how she can find or recognize him. He tells Éliane that he sees her as his mother. The next day, French Indochina becomes independent from France and Vietnam is partitioned into North and South Vietnam.
The film received a total of 3,198,663 cinema-goers in France, making it the 6th most attended film of the year.[7] The film also grossed $5,603,158 in North America.[8]
Critical reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Indochine holds an approval rating of 75%, based on 20 reviews, and an average rating of 6.4/10.[9]
Critics' reviews praised the film's photography and scenery, while citing issues with the plot and character development. Roger Ebert wrote the film "intends to be the French 'Gone with the Wind,' a story of romance and separation, told against the backdrop of a ruinous war". He continued "'Indochine' is an ambitious, gorgeous missed opportunity – too slow, too long, too composed. It is not a successful film, and yet there is so much good in it that perhaps it's worth seeing anyway…The beauty, the photography, the impact of the scenes shot on location in Vietnam, are all striking.“[10]
Rita Kempley of The Washington Post found the transformation of Camille from a naive, pampered innocent to Communist revolutionary to be a compelling plot line, but noted, "The trouble is we never see the fragile teenager undergo this surprising metamorphosis. Director Regis Wargnier seems far more interested in what the white folks are doing back on the plantation". She commented further, "Wargnier, who learned his craft at the elbow of Claude Chabrol, does expose the geographic splendors of Southeast Asia as well as the common sense of its people, whose sly observations lend 'Indochine' both energy and levity".[11]
Of the film's metaphorical mother-daughter relationship between Éliane and her adopted Vietnamese daughter Camille, Nick Davis said “Indochine's allegorical intentions actually play much better than the specific dramas enacted among its characters", adding "While Eliane-as-Establishment, Jean-Baptiste-as-Rebellious-Lower-Class-Youth, and Camille-as-Uneasy Cultural Mixture seem to follow the historical pattern of France's relationship with Indochina, their interactions only make sense to the extent they are interpreted as solely symbolic figures".[12]
