Directed by the Paris-based Cambodian movie maker Rithy Panh, this is a second adaptation of Marguerite Duras's novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique about a French widow trying unsuccessfully to make a go of running a coastal rice farm in Indo-China in the early 1930s and seeing her self-centred son and daughter toy with incest and go to the dogs in the corrupt colonial world. It's a plodding, well-designed affair starring Isabelle Huppert as the mother. The 1958 version, an Italian-American co-production directed by René Clément and co-scripted by Irwin Shaw, had a bizarre international cast headed by Jo Van Fleet as the mother and Anthony Perkins and Sylvana Mangano as her children. It was livelier, but pretty bad.