Children of the Century

Rating:
Summary: When Passion and Pride Collide...
Review: Diane Kury's sumptuous epic tells the true story of French author George Sand's passionate but brutal affair with poet and dandy Alfred de Musset.

An incredibly romantic and sesual film, Children of the Century follows the pairs relationship more than their lives as authors. Their relationship is presented as a constant stryggle between two behmoths. Binoche Sand is graceful and wise, while Magimel's Musset is possessed with an incredible energy (there might be something to all those Sean Penn comparisons after all). The film follows the lovers to Venice where violence, infidelity and selfishness destroy their relationship.

Kury's film is not particularly interested in the pair as writers, or in the larger literary scene of the time. Instead she recounts a marvellously messy affair in all its glory. Both are seen as selfish, kind and above all proud. The sexual element of their relationship is not shied away from, as Kurys explores how a proto-feminist such as Sand fits into a conventional relationship... Binoche in particular develops Sand with a fine finesse and a calm serenity.

Children of the Century is a fine example of French costume drama and sits well alongside Queen Margot and the Horseman on the Roof, although it's story is not as rousing as those two. However it does not meet to the haunting standard of two heritage classics... Cyrano de Bergerac and Binoche's own Widow of Saint-Pierre...

As a tale of mad, passionate, all consuming amour you cannot miss this movie...

Rating:
Summary: Costumes, Designs OK - but the story is not quite accurate.
Review: The Alfred de Musset that is portayed here is quite different than the one I know. I think George Sand's relationship with Chopin was much more tumultuous and far more interesting, especially when we would factor in the fact that Sand's son took her side and her daughter took Chopin's side. I think there would be interesting dynamics there.

I have one major problem with this story line. We know Sand met Musset in the 1830s and that Musset died in 1857, which happens in the movie. But Chopin died in 1849 - and he is never mentioned!! There is a reference to Liszt being a priest im the mid-1850s. That was a bit early. That came around 1860 as I recollected. If the script intended to relay the idea that everytime Sand and Musset fought that they didn't see each other for a number of years at a time, then it was not effective. For one thing, Sand never looked any older and neither did Musset - at all.

Conclusion: George Sand is one of the most interesting women in history. This movie doesn't quite get her right. Neither did it get her right in the movie Impromptu, where we have a completely different Musset. But, in all fairness to the directors and the producers, portraying these "children of the century" along which I would include Chopin, Delacroix, Balzac, Hugo, Liszt, D'Agoult, Berlioz, Gautier, Saint-Beuve, Flaubert (who knew Sand very well), among others, in a movie, would not be an easy feat. So I congratulate them for a good job - half done.

Rating:
Summary: Banal Binoche extravaganza
Review: This film began as a beautiful European historical period piece, in Paris, which lush costumes, gorgeous people, etc. But after an hour, it deteriorated into incredibly boring melodrama with Binoche placed in alternating picturesque European cities and sex scenes. No deep emotions are penetrated, more than many other Binoche vehicles like "Chocolat" and "The Horseman on the Roof". I couldn't wait for it to end -- it's 2 hours seemed like 4.

Rating:
Summary: Children Always Grow Up....Even These Two
Review: This French film is a depiction of infamous lovers, 19th century writers George Sand and Alfred de Musset.

The storyline for this movie is based on a memoir written by Alfred de Musset after his notoriously bitter breakup with George Sand. Musset bordered on crazy and his passions became ignited by the independence of Sand, never one to cower before a man. Sand admits her passionate frustration toward Musset in her own memoirs written years later. They are the essence of the perfect couple until they drive one another insane; Musset with his arrogant talented laziness and ever roaming eye for sexual escapades and other outlets and Sand for her feminine machismo that defies the strongest of men during her era.

I was disappointed with the casting of Juliette Binoche as George Sand in this movie because Sand was far from beautiful and even very often described as ugly, so why cast the exquisitely delicate and beautiful Binoche in this role? Binoche is perfect as the actress in this part she just doesn't capture the essence of George Sand. But if Sand is just another 19th century woman to you then you will never notice the difference and not be harmed by this miscasted role. Benoit Magimel, however, is the perfect actor to play the wildly mad Alfred de Musset. Magimel is the essence of childishness in this role, arrogant, spoiled by his talent and open to anything even to what will ultimately doom him in the end. Together Binoche and Magimel portray lovers with too much passion, that crazy kind that never works but always stays around to haunt you.

I recommend reading about the controversial lives of these people, George Sand and Alfred de Musset, after watching this film for a better perspective on how they each affected one another's lives. Both figures were notorious in their day yet they contributed great works of art to our world and deserve their notoriety. As with all irresponsible behaviors and relationships they eventually move on to dust blown away in the wind. This movie is better than dust but the lives of Sand and Musset held better value once they were apart and as a historical record there are other avenues to pursue. As a film however this one is beautiful and sadly tragic at the same time well worth the childish behaviors.


Rating:
Summary: well done, but
Review: what's the big deal? if you don't know who george sand and a de musset were, it's just a clueless movie. french movie got a different way to approach a story, if it's not well scripted, sometimes just turned out weird and distant. musset is a wimp and loser, never fully grown up and mature enough. george sand, a contempory writer in that era was just a b-level writer, trying very hard to stand out by doing some tomboy or dyke style costumes and gestures. think about it, if you've already got two children, and you have a passion of writing, and you'd still have a side-tracked passion for a wimp. yeah, usually strong-minded women got such flaw, but what's the big deal? was that kinda love very touching? no. so you sometimes quarrel, and then what? just made up in bed again and again? in 19th century, lovers were just doing lip services to each other. love, love, passion, passion, everything was just written on the paper, in the letters, out of one's mouth to fool each other, for what? just to get laid for free again and again. commitment? forever? never! this is such a lame and boring movie, if you were touched or moved, it only proved that you were so easily to be fooled by a man or woman who just wanted steal your body instead of your heart. wise up!

Rating:
Summary: Passion is What it Takes to, One Day, Say "I Have Lived."
Review: You gasp when she gasps. She vexes you when she's mad. She has this inscrutable ability of stealing you from your surroundings by a daring look or a despairing smile. Juliette Binoche. That passionate, vivid woman whose eyes speak to you like the night, and chronicle the tale of natural talent. In 'Les Enfants du Siecle' (Children of the Century) she impersonates George Sand who had inspired Chateaubriand and Herzen and whose works had influenced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Proust. Sand had played a significant role in the novel's evolution. She had called sexual identity and gender destiny into question in her own fiction. A controversial rebel and illustrious romanticist in an era that could espouse Hugo and Lamartine, she defied convention and led off a free-spirited and irreversible way of life for women. "My profession," she once wrote, "is to be free."

The movie recounts her intimate involvement with Alfred de Musset, the poet and playwright attractively played by Benoit Magimel. Musset was a devil-may-care whoremonger and gambler who indulged in opium, but who was also the man who adored her absolutely and could not live without her. He was also the man for whom she had suffered the pain of her lifetime. "Once my heart was captured," she tells, "reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?"

Sand scandalized 19th-century Paris but her voice could not be hushed. She smoked cigars in public, wore male attire, wished to be addressed as "mon frere," and advocated free love in an epoch when men were unconcerned with women's right to physical pleasure. With Alfred, the woman in Sand broke open the cage of the French haute bourgeoisie; he introduced her to desire, passion, and most importantly a love she could not do without no matter how persistently she tried. Unreservedly, she introduced him to herself, a woman made of feeling and courage, a woman who loved him too much. "You taught me to love that way," she tells him. That was enough to disrupt his happy-go-lucky and excessive life forever.

Directed by Diane Kurys (Love After Love & Entre Nous), and whose costumes were made by French couturier Christian Lacroix, the movie glistens in quality and precision, whether that of period interiors, music mood, or supporting performance.

Although Sand had been portrayed before in Judy Davis' 1990 film 'Impromptu' that had explored her love affair with Chopin, 'Les Enfants du Siecle' explores the love that had transformed her life and marked it with an unfogettable moral:

"Love does exist," she confesses in the end. "It's not an illusion. I'm sure of that now. One merely has to recognise it, and be humble before it. We didn't understand it. We parted in the arrogance of youth. We didn't know then what we learnt with time: We only love once with all our soul. Today, I know it. It was him. He was that one time."

But it was too late.