Rithy Panh’s The Sea Wall (a.k.a Un barrage contre le Pacifique), newly available on DVD from Axiom Films, is less eager and high-flown than Régis Wargnier’s Oscar-winning Indochine (probably the most popular film about France’s colonial adventures in southeast Asia), but it has similar impulses to the 1992 epic. Besides a plot based around a landowning French matriarch (Catherine Deneuve in Indochine, Isabelle Huppert in The Sea Wall) and her daughter’s interracial love affair, both films suffer from helplessly luscious cinematography and confused political needs.

Panh, a Cambodian filmmaker who trained in France, has spent his career documenting the Cambodia of living memory, specifically the racist, medievalist Khmer Rouge regime – responsible for the deaths of his immediate family in the ’70s – and the country’s subsequent moral and economic recovery. In adapting Marguerite Duras’s 1950 novel, Panh turns his attention to a previous generation, when the Indochinese peninsula marked the furthest reach of the French empire, and he relegates the indigenes to walk-on roles.

Recounting the plot will sound many of the anti-imperialist objections that you might expect from Panh and, before him, Duras, who grew up in Cambodia and became a French Communist in Vichy France (the novel is a ‘fictionalised’ autobiography). La Mère (Huppert), a former schoolteacher, has unwisely invested her savings in 12 acres of ricefield, which are slowly drowning in sea water. Her son Joseph (Gaspard Ulliel), naked torso chiselled into graded mesas and in receipt of all the right vitamins, is more interested in killing animals and seducing rich men’s wives. Luminous 16 year-old daughter Suzanne (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is meanwhile embarking on a photogenic romance with a Vietnamese businessman (Randal Douc), a coupling frowned on by mère and frère, and at the same time recognised as a vital source of funds. The family project is the most sociable kind of colonialism – Huppert’s character wades ankle-deep into the swamp grass, elbow-to-elbow with the dispossessed. When she’s fighting the land registry and the banks, it’s an anxious battle against mostly anonymous, and soon-to-be brutal, forces.

But who is the beneficiary of her tireless efforts? The film is ambiguous; toward the end Huppert denounces the dehumanising effect of the French authorities’ piratical policy of land seizure, suggesting they are “depriving them [the indigenes] of their dignity”. But her utopia, though less obviously violent, depends on a small but similar catastrophe. The inheritance is for the white children only. In one of Panh’s more blatantly symbolic scenes, the family fool around at the dinner table – “We’ll crush the poor wherever they may be!” – just as their roof starts to cave in. This is not a forensic analysis of late imperial malaise, exactly – I am now realising how unique Marco Bechis’s Birdwatchers is – but it is unusually unsympathetic to its white muscle. In French cinema, gnarly, emotive performances like Huppert’s can seem to be delving for tears, often. In The Sea Wall, she dredges vomit.

Sadly, Panh’s neat assemblage is dramatically limp. I’d describe Marc Marder’s score as Hollywood-pastoral, and together with the incandescently fertile landscape photography and sense of absent intent (you can, I think, tell that a novelist’s voice has gone missing somewhere), it invalidates the adaptation’s virtues. Panh tries, badly, to seduce us with ostentaion. Simultaneously, his impulse is to be indignant. The Sea Wall attempts to gentrify what is vile; it is interesting to watch it fail.

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