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Australia / France 1997
Directed by
Carl Schultz
98 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2.5 stars

Love In Ambush

This unremarkable telemovie about an Australian woman (Sigrid Thornton) searching for her soldier brother in Cambodia during the civil breakdown from which Pol Pot would emerge is dramatically very familiar stuff with the usual characters, themes and situations, typical post-colonial issues, being spiced up with the usual romantic dalliances and skeletons in the closet.

Falling far short of comparable elegiac, farewell-to-all-that efforts such as Regis Wargnier's Indochine (1992), with its formulaic story, picturesque settings and Frenchman Jacques Perrin as Thornton's pro-rebel ex-husband it is hard not to imagine a song bubbling to the surface a la South Pacific (1958). Then again, when compared to the disastrous Turtle Beach which came out the previous year and had Greta Scacchi taking up the cause of Vietnamese boat people in Malaya, it is at least a coherent and soundly-made film for its format. 

 

 

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