Children of the Century

This bodice-ripper from Diane Kurys about the tempestuous romance between George Sand and Alfred de Musset features some very fine bodices but adds up to a tempest in a teapot (or glass of absinthe, as the case may be.) As Sand, Juliette Binoche is not as lively as Judy Davis was in Impromptu, and Benoit Magimel, the real-life father of her children, is odious and impenetrable as Musset. Oh sure, the prolonged, systematic derangement of the senses may have been all the rage in 1830s France, but this romance doesn’t make much sense at all. Lovely to look at, however, and something I had to vet as possible to program at the Clark sometime (Delacroix is a minor character), this illustration of the lives of classic authors was as lost on me as the authors themselves. It’s not as tiresome as Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, but not nearly as engaging as the portrayal of Coleridge and Wordsworth, two Romantic poets I actually care about, in Pandaemonium. (1999, dvd, r.) *5+*