This good-looking 1930s-set melodrama-with-a-social-conscience is a daring move for documentarist Rithy Panh, but far from a risk-taking movie.
Granted, it laudably (if slightly clumsily) juggles the plight of dispossessed Cambodian villagers with that of its desperate colonial heroine, who struggles with a sea-menaced estate and wild teenagers.
But only Isabelle Huppert’s superbly prickly performance as the widow raging against fate and the authorities gives a welcome, caustic edge to this middlebrow drama of despair and desire.
Whether she’s walling in her rice paddies or thinking of pimping out her daughter, Huppert rivets.
Read the full The Sea Wall review
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