Chopin's music has always been deeply touching, also soul-searching and quite haunting when played very well. Even when a film/TV series does stretch the truth a bit, it does deserve to stand on its own two feet, there are historically flimsy films that are still great films in their own way but there are also others where the historical flimsiness is the least of its problems. And actually that is the case with Desire of Love. It is beautifully filmed, while the costumes and sets are just as striking as well as the scenery. Chopin's music is phenomenal, and the way it's played has all the impact the music ought to have and the players allow the music to speak for itself. The acting is reasonably good and the actors do what they can, Danuta Stenka is very impassioned and with a physical likeliness to George Sand herself it is like Sand come to life. Piotr Adamczyk is credible as Chopin as well. Desire of Love however is one of those instances where there are good intentions and ideas that are not executed very well at all. The dialogue is very ham-fisted, not very natural in flow and with the bouts of tedious melodrama too much like an overdone/overwrought soap opera. The direction often plays too much of a mood-piece, and sadly there are not many moods to be found here, so it was a well-intended approach that back-fired. The story is rather pedestrian pace-wise and is very disjointed, with everything jumping around and about as often as it did too often it was not easy to fully follow. While some of the content in Desire of Love probably was accurate, very little is done to help us learn of the context of each piece, or to fully get and identify with the characters(written in a rather shallow way) and the connection between Chopin's life and his music is very poorly explored. And as great the music is and how wonderfully played it is, a lot of it was only in snippets, the music deserves better than that. In conclusion, visually and musically outstanding and with a decent cast but dull, ham-fisted, disjointed and just not as interesting as it should've been. 4/10 Bethany Cox
