Éliane Devries owns rubber plantations in French Indochina in the 1930s. She is French, powerful, and entirely convinced that what she does is right. Her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, grows up to become someone Éliane cannot control — someone who sees French colonialism for what it is. The confrontation between these two women, played across decades and continents, is the story of French empire told from the inside — by people who believed in it, and then had to reckon with what they had believed.
Indochine (Régis Wargnier, 1992) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and features French spoken in the colonial register — formal, assured, often beautiful, and entirely blind to itself. The film is essential for any advanced French class that wants to grapple with what France did in Southeast Asia and what it means that French is now one of Vietnam's minority languages. Catherine Deneuve's performance is the best argument for studying the subjunctive mood that any French teacher has ever had.
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Key Themes for the Classroom
- Colonialism and love: Éliane loves Camille, loves Indochina, and helps destroy both. Ask students: can love coexist with exploitation? What French vocabulary describes the colonizer's self-image: la mission civilisatrice, le devoir, la protection, l'appartenance?
- Mother and daughter: Éliane adopts Camille but cannot release her. When Camille becomes politically active, Éliane's response is both protective and controlling. This is not simply a colonial allegory — it's a genuinely complex family story.
- France in Asia: Students who have never considered that French is spoken in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will encounter that reality here. Use it to map the Francophone world's eastern edge.
One Scene to Use
The opening sequence — Éliane's voiceover narrating her memory of Indochina as a place she loved and lost — uses French at its most literary and melancholy. The vocabulary of memory and loss: se souvenir, disparaître, appartenir, lointain, jadis. Transcribe two sentences from the voiceover and have students identify every verb tense. The variety is itself a grammar lesson.
One Low-Prep Classroom Activity
Give students a map of French Indochina (1880–1954) and ask them to identify what countries exist there now. Then ask: what languages are spoken in those countries today, and which of them include French? The geography becomes a francophonie lesson, and the lesson connects directly to what the film is about.
The full French lesson plan for Indochine is ready at filmarobics.com/products/indochine — $29.95.
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Students who work through this unit leave understanding that French colonialism left a language behind everywhere it went — and that language is one of the most complex things France's history has to answer for.
