30s. Colonial Saigon. A handsome, wealthy, sophisticated Chinese man meets a French woman. She is fifteen years old. Their love is under parental restrictions. But such an “empire of senses”, captivating and strong, cannot be destroyed by anyone.

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“You will remember this day all your life,
even if you forget my face and name … ”

A quick pen glides on paper … Lines run away from the pen and begin to live their lives, folding into paragraphs and chapters of history … Having felt which, you will never forget … Stories of the first feeling, golden tenderness, unexplored novelty and light sadness …

“In my life, I became an adult too early … At 18 it was already too late. At 18 I was already getting old. This aging was disgusting. I saw how it spreads over my body step by step … But instead of getting scared, I watched the aging of my face with the same interest with which I could, for example, read about it in a book … ”

And now she’s 15. She’s on the ferry that takes her across the Mekong. She is fragile, young, curious and self-confident, like many girls her age … Pigtails are tied with ordinary black ribbons, her lips are tinted with pink lipstick … She is wearing a modest summer dress, frayed cabaret shoes with rhinestones and a man’s hat. In those days, not a single woman in the colony wore men’s hats. It was strange. This hat in those days gave her confidence and made her feel whole … Then she would never throw it away … The ferry slowly creeps along the huge yellow-gray plains of mud. Flocks of birds are circling over the surface of the spilled Mekong, the air smells of rotten water and black coal smoke from the chimney …

That day, school holidays ended, and she was returning from Sa-Dek, where her family lived, to Saigon, where her school was … And here she is, leaning her foot on the railing, looking at the dull Mekong with a bored look and out of the corner of her eye that she is being watched … A man in a white suit, sitting in the back seat of a shiny black car … A man got out of the car and, going up to her, spoke up … offered a cigarette, she refused, and a conversation started … A banal acquaintance … But how much it will mean to her and for him later, after days, months and years …

She is 15, he is 32. She is white, he is Chinese. She is from a family that has become impoverished to the point of losing shame, he is from a rich old family that honors traditions and practically owns this city … She is a curious girl to everything new, he is a rich daddy’s son, who has not worked a day in her life … She is decisive in her desires girl, he is a bum, missing the gay Paris (from which he recently returned), and now at home looking for entertainment in opium dens and local brothels … She has a bed in a girls’ boarding house, he has a bachelor apartment donated by his father, where he periodically brings girls who agree to go with him for a standard price …

What could grow out of their acquaintance? Nothing. Their future was already impossible in advance, but … Why does your heart ache when you see his eyes filled with sadness? And you understand this sudden feeling that rushed over them at the moment of contact with their fingertips …

– I’m afraid to love you.
“I don’t want you to love me. Do to me what you do to other women. Just do it as usual …
– Do you want this???
– Yes.

She wanted to understand what it was like to have fun with a complete stranger. She, like other girls with whom she studied, was drawn to the vicious and forbidden. Some of her classmates became prostitutes, and when they found out about it, the girls were kicked out of school …

And sleeping with the Chinese is just out of the ordinary! This is a stigma for life, a cross on the possibility of getting married and an indelible shame. But … when the family has no money even for food, when the last penny from the house is stolen by an older brother who is thoroughly addicted to opium, when the mother no longer has the strength or desire to change anything in this life … Can’t this be an excuse for her meeting a rich Chinese? So, probably, calming herself, the girl reasoned, walking with a young attractive man to his bachelor apartment …

She will never forget that day … Dusty streets filled with people, hubbub, heat, smells of soup, fried meat, jasmine, coal, smells of a Chinese city … And this apartment with curtained windows, which will become their shelter … And the twilight … Then she will come here many, many times … She will even think over her principles, from which she will not retreat a single step: “He is at my feet, I’m with him only for the sake of money. I cannot love him because he is Chinese, not white. ”

But … his kisses are so delightful, his skin is so tender, and everything they do in the twilight of this room is so delightful that the game in which she pretends to be a vicious girl is addictive … And she is ready to endure ignorance at school, insults to her mother , beatings of the older brother, for the sake of meeting with him … But … everything comes to an end. The circumstances of life are such that it makes no sense to fight against them … They just take it for granted …

Farewell whistle of the ship … The retractable gangway was turned down, the tugs pulled the ship along with them from the land she was mourning … She did not show her tears … And no one noticed her sadness … And she looked to where his car was parked. He never got out … But he was there, in the back of the car, barely discernible, motionless, broken … She stood with her foot on the crossbar, as on the day they met on the ferry … He watched her, and she knew it … Minutes passed , she stopped seeing his silhouette, but continued to look in the direction of the car decreasing to a black point … Soon she stopped seeing her too … The pier disappeared in the distance, and then the land …

“One night in the Indian Ocean, in the main hall on the large deck, the melody of Chopin’s waltz was suddenly heard … It was not a breath of wind … That night, the music enveloped the entire black liner, like a message from heaven, referring to something unknown … She cried, remembering this a man, her lover … She suddenly lost confidence that she did not love him … A feeling that she herself did not accept dissolved in her like water in sand … She realized that she had discovered Love in herself in those minutes when the music flew over the ocean … ”

She has a long adult life ahead … Marriages, children, divorces, creativity … Many novels will come out from her pen … But she will never forget him …

And he … He will never stop loving her, he will keep his love until his death …

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (84.9 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10+
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
French: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
German: LPCM 2.0

Subtitles
English SDH, German, French, Spanish.