Rimbaud Verlaine

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?

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.

I realized going into this film that it was not going to be a straight bio-pic about Rimbaud's life so that loosened my expectations for the movie a bit, which is good considering had I expected a life story I would've been sorely disappointed. This film is more about Rimbaud's rocky relationship with fellow poet, Verlaine, whom he falls in love with and subsequently about Verlaine being stuck between a rock and a hard place with Rimbaud on one side and his beautiful but ultimately empty headed wife, Mathilde on the other.

The set/costume design was done well enough; not enough to win awards but enough to make the time and place believable. What stands out the most, though, is the acting and of course the wonderful violin heavy score. DiCaprio gives an inspired performance as the young, opinionated, Rimbaud as does Thewlis in his role as the older poet, Verlaine who takes him under his wing. You won't get a complete round view of either man or his life here, but what you will get is a story about love, madness, writing and the search for meaning.

If you like what you see of Rimbaud from this movie, I would whole heartedly recommend his work to you and any and all written biographies as they will shed even more light on a truly great poet's life.

Genius is by nature sui generis. Most of us can only observe and wonder, and from time to time pretend we are similarly gifted. As for the actual behavior of genius, it almost always entails what is commonly known as bad manners.

The other striking feature of genius, for some but not all, is what is commonly known as insanity. Although modern science has defined various types of mental disorder and found causes and cures for some of them, it really begs the question to try to judge character or morality on the basis of scientific data. Art lies after all outside the realm of science, and always will do.

Having said that, I believe the film Total Eclipse must be reviewed or criticized solely on whether it is a good work of art. My opinion is that it succeeds at some levels, and fails at others.

I accept that the writer and director knew exactly what they were doing at every step. Except for a few quibbles about editing, I agree that the artistic concept and the technique are first rate. The musical score is excellent. The camera angles are generally adept at conveying the actions and emotions of the cast. Outdoor scenes tend to be well conceived.

Unfortunately, all that falls by the wayside because of flaws in relating the story accurately and well to its origins. Anyone familiar with the lives and work of Verlaine and Rimbaud can only cringe at the superficiality of this film. As many others have pointed out, scant attention is paid to verse, and then only in a language -- English -- that only approximates the original. It would have been a graceful beginning to make this film in France with French characters speaking French, then allowing the subtitles to fill in the gaps for non-French-speaking viewers.

What that conclusion implies, of course, is that the primary cast is wrong for this film. I really hate to say that, because DiCaprio and Thewlis are great actors doing the best they can to carry the film forward. Although I would have picked a different physical specimen for the role of Verlaine (for some odd reason the face of the late German director Fassbinder comes to mind), the choice of an androgyne for Rimbaud was physically right on target.

Finally, I am appalled at some of the comments here that betray a preoccupation with sex. "Zany" is the only word one can apply to subjective and even judgmental interpretations of this film about this or that scene or bit of action not in accord with a viewer's personal sexual expectations. My own view is that this was, if anything, a highly bowdlerized adaptation of reality.

In short, recast this in French, and focus more on the full text of Rimbaud's genius.