Die Affäre von Rimbaud und Verlaine

This movie is not for the faint of heart or the conventional taste. It's not a fantasy.

Like the real-life characters upon which the movie is based, TE is eccentric and poetical. French poet Rimbaud, who wrote almost everything he wrote as a teenager, has been admired by some of the most eccentric creative people of the last century. He was a very unusual teenager, being some kind of genius, some kind of lowlife, and a runaway. His poetry digs into and portrays life with discomforting and sometimes painful and sometimes ecstatic detail. His is the muse which revels in the squalor of creation.

Many people will dislike this film because the two main characters, Rimbaud and Verlaine, are bisexual and not at all stereotypical. Both of them are snotty and selfish and violent and often despicable. (As Shakespeare probably was at times, but you'll never see him portrayed in movies that way.) These are not Robert Frost poets. These are worm and scat and sex and drug and rock'n'roll and get-down-and-get-dirty poets.

Past that, it's the story of a great, if brief, flowering love ... the kind of love story you'd expect for people who live and breathe life in the way great alternaculture poets must.

Eternity is where the sunlight mixes with the water. And the penetrating movie mixes with the prepared mind.

This art-house film is not a crowd-pleaser but is nevertheless an excellent film. It is one of DiCaprio's best independent films before he became a titanic superstar.

Rimbaud"s painfully self-destructive bisexual life and his affair with Verlaine is not a "nice" story to tell, but the drama is interesting as a study in the eccentric mind of the artist. Beneath the plot is the age-old question of whether the artist's oddness hinders his creativity or is actually the fuel for his art.

Arthur Rimbaud was famous for what? For changing the face of French and possibly all modern poetry. At the age of 17. Do we see any of this in the movie? No. We have a director who thinks that being gay was Rimbaud's muse. All through the film, I kept wondering, "when are they going to let him read his poetry, and show us WHY it was important, HOW it contrasted with conventional poetry at the time?" I mean, if you're brave enough to try to sell graphic homosexual scenes to a Merchant Ivory audience, then why not be brave enough to "bore" us with some literary analysis?

It's a good thing not too many people saw this film when it came out [no pun intended], because, if any of DiCaprio's female fans had seen him in this, one of his best early roles, his career would have been over well before he was involved in "Titanic." And that's because he's so utterly convincing as the tortured, bisexual teen genius poet Arthur Rimbaud, that it would undoubtedly set many of those young ladies to wondering if he'd played the part a little TOO well, if you get my meaning. If ever there was any such thing as a male femme fatale, It's Leo right here. Rumor has it that he tried to have the video pulled a few years ago, right after his "Titanic" success. It's a good thing he wasn't successful, because I think that this film rates right along with "The Basketball Diaries" as possibly his best performance.

But it takes two to tango, at least in this case, and David Thewlis is almost as good opposite DiCaprio as Paul Verlaine, who began as Rimbaud's mentor and wound up as his long-time lover. As Verlaine was ugly and overweight, whereas Rimbaud was lithe and handsome, the two seemingly would have made an unbelieveably odd couple physically, but were drawn together more by their mutual likes and dislikes rather than physical attraction. And that's what you sense through all of their scenes together, a meeting of minds more than a meeting of bodies.

There were many who praised this movie, there were many who hated it, but love it or hate it, it holds a strange fascination which makes you remember it long after you've seen it.

Total Eclipse is the story of the relationship between two men who definitely made their mark on French literature. Poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud have been compared to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, but aside from being gay the pairs have little in common. Wilde is a universally recognized talent who had the misfortune to fall in love with a spoiled young aristocrat in Douglas who had some pretenses to literary talent. Douglas was spoiled, but both he and Wilde conducted themselves well in public.

Verlaine and Rimbaud were a pair of talented louts as Total Eclipse shows us in graphic detail. Wilde married for convention's sake at the time and did have two sons and was a loving husband. His is a Victorian Brokeback Mountain story. Verlaine was a drunk and an abusive husband who regularly beat on his wife and child who was totally fascinated by young Rimbaud. He was ten years older than Rimbaud in real life, the film does make him seem a great deal older. He did read some of Rimbaud's work as a teenage prodigy and sent for the country lad. You can feel sorry for Wilde and do in the films that tell his story. Verlaine as played by David Thewlis is a really hateful person, gay audiences can't work up any sympathy for him.

However Rimbaud as played by Leonardo DiCaprio by look and talent makes you perfectly understand why Rimbaud became so obsessed with him. Verlaine was a political man, he was a supporter of the Paris Commune and was in fear of the police who would have loved to nail him on a morals charge if not on a political one. Rimbaud didn't have a political opinion in the world, he was a peasant kid from the Ardennes who partied hardy, drove Verlaine crazy and jealous, but both learned and fed off each other artistically. I found it interesting that Rimbaud and Verlaine flee to Great Britain of all places to be freer, the same place that in the next generation would persecute poor Oscar Wilde.

DiCaprio and Thewlis play a couple of louts, but a fascinating pair of louts. Total Eclipse has both these guys eclipsing the supporting cast around them, that probably is the main weakness of the film. Still fans of both men shouldn't miss this film.