Total Eclipse

Total Eclipse is the story of the relationship between two men who definitely made their mark on French literature. Poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud have been compared to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, but aside from being gay the pairs have little in common. Wilde is a universally recognized talent who had the misfortune to fall in love with a spoiled young aristocrat in Douglas who had some pretenses to literary talent. Douglas was spoiled, but both he and Wilde conducted themselves well in public.

Verlaine and Rimbaud were a pair of talented louts as Total Eclipse shows us in graphic detail. Wilde married for convention's sake at the time and did have two sons and was a loving husband. His is a Victorian Brokeback Mountain story. Verlaine was a drunk and an abusive husband who regularly beat on his wife and child who was totally fascinated by young Rimbaud. He was ten years older than Rimbaud in real life, the film does make him seem a great deal older. He did read some of Rimbaud's work as a teenage prodigy and sent for the country lad. You can feel sorry for Wilde and do in the films that tell his story. Verlaine as played by David Thewlis is a really hateful person, gay audiences can't work up any sympathy for him.

However Rimbaud as played by Leonardo DiCaprio by look and talent makes you perfectly understand why Rimbaud became so obsessed with him. Verlaine was a political man, he was a supporter of the Paris Commune and was in fear of the police who would have loved to nail him on a morals charge if not on a political one. Rimbaud didn't have a political opinion in the world, he was a peasant kid from the Ardennes who partied hardy, drove Verlaine crazy and jealous, but both learned and fed off each other artistically. I found it interesting that Rimbaud and Verlaine flee to Great Britain of all places to be freer, the same place that in the next generation would persecute poor Oscar Wilde.

DiCaprio and Thewlis play a couple of louts, but a fascinating pair of louts. Total Eclipse has both these guys eclipsing the supporting cast around them, that probably is the main weakness of the film. Still fans of both men shouldn't miss this film.

It's a good thing not too many people saw this film when it came out [no pun intended], because, if any of DiCaprio's female fans had seen him in this, one of his best early roles, his career would have been over well before he was involved in "Titanic." And that's because he's so utterly convincing as the tortured, bisexual teen genius poet Arthur Rimbaud, that it would undoubtedly set many of those young ladies to wondering if he'd played the part a little TOO well, if you get my meaning. If ever there was any such thing as a male femme fatale, It's Leo right here. Rumor has it that he tried to have the video pulled a few years ago, right after his "Titanic" success. It's a good thing he wasn't successful, because I think that this film rates right along with "The Basketball Diaries" as possibly his best performance.

But it takes two to tango, at least in this case, and David Thewlis is almost as good opposite DiCaprio as Paul Verlaine, who began as Rimbaud's mentor and wound up as his long-time lover. As Verlaine was ugly and overweight, whereas Rimbaud was lithe and handsome, the two seemingly would have made an unbelieveably odd couple physically, but were drawn together more by their mutual likes and dislikes rather than physical attraction. And that's what you sense through all of their scenes together, a meeting of minds more than a meeting of bodies.

There were many who praised this movie, there were many who hated it, but love it or hate it, it holds a strange fascination which makes you remember it long after you've seen it.

This movie is not for the faint of heart or the conventional taste. It's not a fantasy.

Like the real-life characters upon which the movie is based, TE is eccentric and poetical. French poet Rimbaud, who wrote almost everything he wrote as a teenager, has been admired by some of the most eccentric creative people of the last century. He was a very unusual teenager, being some kind of genius, some kind of lowlife, and a runaway. His poetry digs into and portrays life with discomforting and sometimes painful and sometimes ecstatic detail. His is the muse which revels in the squalor of creation.

Many people will dislike this film because the two main characters, Rimbaud and Verlaine, are bisexual and not at all stereotypical. Both of them are snotty and selfish and violent and often despicable. (As Shakespeare probably was at times, but you'll never see him portrayed in movies that way.) These are not Robert Frost poets. These are worm and scat and sex and drug and rock'n'roll and get-down-and-get-dirty poets.

Past that, it's the story of a great, if brief, flowering love ... the kind of love story you'd expect for people who live and breathe life in the way great alternaculture poets must.

Eternity is where the sunlight mixes with the water. And the penetrating movie mixes with the prepared mind.

Arthur Rimbaud was famous for what? For changing the face of French and possibly all modern poetry. At the age of 17. Do we see any of this in the movie? No. We have a director who thinks that being gay was Rimbaud's muse. All through the film, I kept wondering, "when are they going to let him read his poetry, and show us WHY it was important, HOW it contrasted with conventional poetry at the time?" I mean, if you're brave enough to try to sell graphic homosexual scenes to a Merchant Ivory audience, then why not be brave enough to "bore" us with some literary analysis?

This is a worthy and successful attempt to make a film about the famous literary and personal relationship between two great poets, Paul Verlaine and the young Arthur Rimbaud. How the French must have resented its being made in English! (But why did the French themselves never film this story, which is so fundamental to the mythology of their literature?) There is no use viewers and reviewers complaining that the characters are disgusting: everybody knows they were, and they would have been the first to admit it. This film has not been made for the wrong reasons, with fictional characters, but is a true story. It is rather disturbing to realize that absinthe has been legalised again and people are drinking it once more, when we see how it drove these two poets insane, which is what is really does, you know! The banning of absinthe should never have been lifted. It may be a pretty green colour, but it is not romantic or at all glamorous. One strange omission from this film is any of the poetry of either poet! Very few decent translations of Verlaine into English exist, because he used rhyme so much. But he was a great and soaring poet, and of course Rimbaud shattered all the moulds and basically founded modern poetry, and had the status of a god to the Surrealists. So it would have been good to hear some of their work, especially as it is all out of copyright and no one could have objected. The lack of the poetry stops people who do not already know it from appreciating the point of all this carrying-on. Verlaine and Rimbaud were appalling, violent, disorderly, and to call them extreme Bohemians doesn't go far enough: they were both quite mad as well. But then, many poets are, and often the finest poetry comes from the ones who are the craziest (David Gascoyne, whom I knew well, is an example, and Ezra Pound whom I knew less well was not what you could call well-balanced). It is often said that there is a fine line between genius and madness, but with poets, the situation is even more dire: to be a divinely inspired poet it seems that it is almost a requirement that you first lose your mind. (Exceptions are those with no fire in their temperament at all: Eliot, Perse, Valery, or those who have become spiritual beings while still on earth, such as Rilke.) Well, the performances and direction are excellent here. Agnieszka Holland is an inspired director, a protégé of Wajda, and perhaps her greatest achievement was 'Washington Square' (1997). She is interested in art, not commerce, and congratulations to her for that! The young Leonardo Di Caprio, aged 20, was a scintillating, wild, and wholly convincing Rimbaud. You could believe every scene. David Thewlis was equally convincing as Verlaine, despite being rather too thin for the part (Verlaine was stockier and plumper, and Thewlis looks like he hasn't had a decent meal for ten years). Romane Bohringer was an excellent choice for Verlaine's wife, and plays it just right. The next year she would make her staggering pair of films, 'L'Appartement' and 'Portraits Chinois', in both of which she sets the cinema on fire. So the talent is there, and the film is delivered. If we find these people disturbing, it is because they were. But without this bizarre tale, twentieth century poetry would not have come into existence, because it was created by Arthur Rimbaud, and without Verlaine taking him under his wing it would never have happened. Christopher Hampton's screenplay is intelligent and thoughtful and well-crafted throughout. But then, that is what he does. It is good to have this on the screen, but for those who do not already know the story, it must be a real shocker. It is also not a film for 'homophobes', and if you don't want to see Leonard Di Caprio kissing a man on the mouth, look away now.