Mademoiselle Saigon

By RICHARD CORLISS

TITLE: INDOCHINE

DIRECTOR: REGIS WARGNIER

WRITERS: ERIK ORSENNA, LOUIS GARDEL, CATHERINE COHEN AND REGIS WARGNIER

THE BOTTOM LINE: Catherine Deneuve lends glamour and gravity to a moving epic of the French in Vietnam.

IF YOU WERE TO SELECT AN AMBASsador of European culture, it might be Catherine Deneuve. If you were to choose a film to express the agony and ambiguity of Vietnam in this century, it should be Indochine.

The French have an itch to colonize. For centuries they explored, exploited and educated on three continents. Now their working tours of Africa, North America and Southeast Asia are over. The reverie fades like a holiday suntan; the legacy lingers like a scar. Why shouldn't that wound, which France inflicted on itself and its colonial subjects, be diagnosed on a big screen? Spurred by conscience, retrospection and, not least, the success of Hollywood movies about the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, French moviemakers are gazing into the rearview mirror of their Vietnam.

Perhaps that mirror is blurred by tropical humidity and nostalgie de la boue. Whatever the reason, the French view of Southeast Asia is less wide- and wild-eyed than Oliver Stone's version in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The perspective in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover is as cloistered in its 1920s Saigon love nest as the French were from awareness of the impending revolution. Pierre Schoendoerffer's Dien Bien Phu (yet to open in the U.S.) meticulously restages the climactic French defeat as if it were all about artillery and not national destinies. The French are at times inhibited by good taste and historical scrupulousness.

Regis Wargnier's Indochine takes a gentler, more comprehensive approach. It suggests that the French, at the twilight of their long rule in Indochina, saw themselves not as the region's colonizers -- ravaging its natural and human resources -- but as its foster parents, nourishing a lovely, lorn child with the civilizing bounty of French culture. That, anyway, is Indochine's explicit metaphor. Eliane (Catherine Deneuve), the owner of a rubber plantation, raises Camille (Linh Dan Pham), an orphan princess of Annam, as her own daughter. What could separate these two beautiful women? Only the nationalist uprising of the 1940s and the women's competing love for a handsome French officer (Vincent Perez), a kind of Lieut. Pinkerton in this Mademoiselle Saigon.

Filmed in Vietnam, Malaysia, Switzerland and France, covering 155 minutes of screen time and 30 years of convulsive history, Indochine sprawls and enthralls. It has the breadth and intelligence of the David Lean epics from whose plots it borrows: the juggling of passion and politics in Doctor Zhivago, the muddle of racial emotions in A Passage to India, the grandiose failure of colonial outsiders in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. But Indochine's vision is essentially feminine; its ample grief is that of a mother mourning her lost children in a land shifting and receding under her feet.

And in Deneuve, Indochine has a star of epic glamour and gravity. Her acting craft gives heft to Eliane's gestures, each more heroic than the one before. Her ageless beauty makes Eliane convincing as both a young woman in love with Vietnam and a grandmother ready to raise another orphan and make it her own. In 1985 the actress was the model for the French national symbol Marianne. Deneuve's presence in Indochine is like some burnished monument to the French spirit miraculously preserved on the streets of Saigon.