In Burma
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In Burma
Destination Burma: it seems this is the last chance of success for César, an unsatisfied editor on a French newspaper. A disastrous vacation and the abrupt ending of what seemed a long, reassuring love story trigger off an unexpected desire for revenge, in the form of a plane ticket for Rangoon and the ambitious objective of a big journalistic scoop: interview the most important drug lord of all time. No contacts, no plan, just a tourist visa and, sitting next to him in the plane, a uniformed officer wearing dark sunglasses, his ticket for a visit to a country devastated by dictatorship and terror. Burma greets César with its double face: a bomb explosion in the centre of the capital and the sensual women with long black hair that offer themselves on every street corner and in every bar. A double face that even all the Westerners who’ve made Burma their second country seem to have, idealists fighting for people’s rights and, at the same time, unable to resist the songs of the sirens wrapped in their colourful longyi. But César’s luck seems to have turned the moment he meets Julie, a passionately determined and stubborn blonde physician with a melancholy charm. Julie accompanies César not only to the centre of her own heart, but also Burma’s, putting him on the track of a mythical figure of Burma’s political rebellion: Wei-wei, the tiger-lady, who guides the opposition from the Asiatic jungle from which only her voice is heard over the radio. And thus, among the peoples of the Golden Triangle and the corrupt youth of the capital, among cynical soldiers and submissive Buddhist monks, among enchanting landscapes and South-East Asia’s thousand contradiction, César’s challenge is played out not so much on the professional level as on the more important level of the search for truth.