Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Against the backdrop of Vietnam's struggle to win independence from the French, Regis Wargnier's 1993 film Indochine presents a personal drama wrought with all the elements of a true epic: a mother's love, a daughter's betrayal, and the war that tears them apart. The symbolism in Wargnier's film is almost too obvious. Isabelle, a French plantation owner played by Catherine Deneuve is thwarted by her adopted Vietnamese daughter, who leaves her to find true love (incidentally, Isabelle's former lover) and join the Communist resistance movement...
...ensuing plot tracks the descent into an inescapable nightmare. Marie is driven by an overwhelming desire to escape the poverty and tyranny of Stalin's Russia and return to France. When a French acting troupe comes to Kiev, Marie seizes an opportunity of escape by giving a letter to the lead actress played by Catherine Deneuve. Marie hopes the French government will recognize her plight and help her return to France...
...Alexei, in the meantime, adapts to the regime by joining the Communist Party and becomes romantically involved with a woman that shares their apartment. Marie eventually finds an ally in Sacha, a young man whose grandmother was arrested and killed after a neighbor overheard her speaking French with Marie and subsequently denounced her to the secret police...
Probably no other area of Cambridge contains a wider mix of people: Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, French-Creoles, Haitians and Portuguese, to name just...
What's most troubling in all this, though, is not the French mindset, but the American - the insularity of Americans in their role as the smug, sole superpower, and even worse (because it is potentially dangerous), their apparent lack of curiosity about what goes on in the rest of the world. The stupid side of the American exceptionalism has always been the American narcissism. It's a paradox that globalization seems to make the narcissism worse...