Starring:
Year of Release: 1995
Rated: R
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Approx. Running Time: 112 minutes
Format(s): DVD
My Rating: 2 stars (Out of 5)
From Back Cover:
Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Man in the Iron Mask, Romeo and Juliet)and David Thewlis (Besieged, The Big Lebowski, The Island of Dr. Moreau) offer a tour-de-force lesson in the seductive strength of art and the destructive power of genius.
DiCaprio plays Arthur Rimbaud - a remarkable but rebellious teenage poet in 19th Century France whose philosophy of living life to the extreme inspired Jim Morrison and the rock generation. Thewlis is Paul Verlaine, a writer of lesser talent who is torn between his growing infatuation with Rimbaud and the domestic demands of his patient wife (Romane Bohringer). Together, these two men feed each other's insatiable hunger for life and love, trying desperately to straddle the lines between knowledge and self-destruction, creativity and delusion.
Director Agnieszka Holland (The Secret Garden) and screenwriter Christopher Hampston (Dangerous Liasons) have lovingly re-created this true story of one man's search for the ultimate poem, another man's search for the ultimate soulmate, and the brilliant madness they find together.
My Comments:
Yet another movie that - for many reasons - lacks rewatchability, at least for me. However, both DiCaprio and Thewlis put in excellent performances as French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, the participants in a doomed love affair born of obsession and, to a degree, envy. So it's certainly worth giving this one a chance.
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T
R (MPAA)
2 Stars
1995
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