"Total Eclipse" captures the excess of Rimbaud's life but misses its mysterious heart. By GARY KAMIYA
The life of Arthur Rimbaud stands like a strange totem of modernity, a legend of inscrutable freedom. At the age of 16, his astonishing verses led the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine to take him up; their sexual relationship, and his outrageous behavior, scandalized literary Paris. After a series of lurid and desperate episodes with the older, married poet, Rimbaud broke with Verlaine. He gave up writing poetry at 19 and became an adventurer, exploring, trading and running guns in the unexplored North African desert; he died at 37. Only a handful of his poems were published in his lifetime, and his entire output consists of two small volumes. But those two volumes changed modern poetry.
It is the Life of the Tortured Modern Genius par excellence, with all the requisite elements: supreme arrogance, total rebellion, world-historical achievement, and final, enigmatic silence. Filmmakers being notoriously drawn to dreams of ultimate escape, it's not surprising that a movie has been made about Arthur Rimbaud's life. Unfortunately, it's also not very surprising that it fails to illuminate what is most interesting about that life.
For all of its supposedly "shocking" gay sex, there's a Cliff's Notes feeling to Total Eclipse, a dutiful, did-you-know- Rimbaud-buggered-Verlaine quality.
Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse is centered on the relationship between eclipser Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio) and eclipsee Verlaine (David Thewlis). Like Holland's Europa, Europa, it is a competent enough narrative -- and also like that film, it doesn't ultimately offer anything more than competent storytelling. For all of its supposedly "shocking" gay sex, there's a Cliff's Notes feeling to Total Eclipse, a dutiful, did-you-know-Rimbaud-buggered-Verlaine quality.
With some subjects, such workmanlike directorial humility might be sufficient -- but not this one. It simply isn't enough to be shown the events, wild and Bohemian though they may be, of these poets' lives. Those lives are interesting, but not as interesting as the ambiguous area where they intersect with their work. And Total Eclipse has almost nothing to say about that.
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