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Cambodian director Rithy Panh directs an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ first novel, culled from her own experiences as a young woman.
Isabelle Huppert plays a civil servant's widow in 1930s Indochina who has to compromise her principles to keep her lands out of the clutches of corrupt French bureaucrats and scheming Asian tycoons.

The destruction of her rice crop and the growing dissolution of her short-fused son (Gaspard Ulliel) forces her to cultivate a relationship between a playboy businessman (Randal Douc) and her 16-year-old daughter (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). But this supposed benefactor has his own agenda, and his revenge upon the family and their tenants is as cynical as it is cruel.

Panh's documentary background enables him and cinematographer Pierre Milon to evoke a palpable sense of time and place, and Huppert gives a riveting performance as the ailing but steely mother.