Les enfants du siècle

I saw this film in French with Spanish subtitles so I had to read very fast! The photography is beautiful. I had not seen either of the principal actors before but I will look for them again. Miss Binoche made George Sand a real person not just an odd woman! The actor who played Alfred de Musset, showed him as charming but weak, very well done.

I loved this movie and I don't know to what extent this movie is near to the original story. I have read the life of George Sand and was amazed by her character. A character so tough when it has to do with freedom of doing what one wants. George Sand was one of my best female characters next to Mary Wolstoncroft, Jane Austin, Emmeline Pankhurst and the famous five. Juliette Binoche has played the role magnificently close and made it feel like I was watching the original Sand.

The love story is so beautiful specially the scene when Benoit Magimel sleeps on the street ground under the rain when Sand comes to visit him in her carriage. Waw!... I mean this is a charming scene, it says a lot about the feelings of love.

Wonderful mise-en-scene of a true passion that turned out to a, damaging love to hate you syndrome especially for Musset. Georges and Musset, they can't do with nor without each other. Their love was the spring of their inspiration that triggered their talent but the problem was that this love could feed only one's inspiration at a time.

Wonderful pictures, acting and especially costume design capture us in the late 1880's France which was a very nice experience.

I was really hoping to find some special quality in the two main characters that I could like. However, self absorbed people are usually too melodramatic about every single aspect of their lives and so I had no sympathy for their predicament at all. So, I settled back and enjoyed Julliet Binochet at work. The film was meticulously crafted and the settings and costumes were wonderful, so I got the time machine effect, too. If you like historical melodrama, you might enjoy this.

If Romanticism, as a movement, can be defined as an "infinite longing" which combines passion and erotic tension with death, despair, and the cycles of nature, then Kurys film portrayal is aptly named and her protagonists--Alfred de Musset and Georges Sand--are indeed children of their century.

The key to understanding the point of this film is to think of it as a painting. It does not give you an insider's view of the relationship between these two literary giants; it does not break down their psychology; and you do not even understand why you, as an audience member, should like either of them. Yet their obsessive love was a monument for the first major artistic movement of the 19th century. Kurys paints them as Delacroix would--in all their lurid color, capturing the details of high emotion without explaining a thing. As painting on film, Les Enfants succeeds as wildly as any Romantic dreamscape and, thus, captures the mood of that era and the sentiment which spawned it more perfectly than 1,000 words on the subject.