French director Jean-Jacque Annaud does brilliantly with films about animals ("The Bear") and cavemen ("Quest for Fire"), but falls flat with this erotic movie called, "The Lover," which is about a teenage white girl (Jane March) having a forbidden affair with a wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung)in 1929 French Indochina. This movie's downfall is its lack of eroticism. We never get a sense that the white girl and the Chinese gentleman are really attracted to each other (to say nothing about being in love with each other). As a result, this film has some steamy foreplay and soft-core sex scenes, but after they end, we feel empty and bored for the remaining hour of this film (compare that to Louis Malle's "Damage" (1992) where Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche's character seem irresistibly drawn to each other and you will notice a huge difference). The sub-plot about prejudices against the Chinese comes across as a cynical (and ineffective) hedge for a film that has nothing else to offer apart from its sex scenes.