Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.
03/03/08 10:42 AM
Les Destinees (2002)
61 %
Reviews Counted: 49 Fresh: 30 Rotten:19 Average Rating: 6/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 54 mins
Synopsis:
From Olivier Assayas, the director of IRMA VEP and L'EAU FROIDE, comes LES DESTINÉES, a tender and sophisticated period piece starring Emmanuelle Béart and Charles Berling. Based on the novel by Jacques Chardonne, this epic film takes place in France from 1900 to the '30s. Focusing on the... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Emmanuelle Beart, Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Perrier, Julie Depardieu
Director: Olivier Assayas
Screenwriter: Olivier Assayas, Jacques Fieschi
Producer: Bruno Pesery
Composer: Guillaume Lekeu
Screenwriter: Olivier Assayas, Jacques Fieschi
Producer: Bruno Pesery
Composer: Guillaume Lekeu
Reviews
Top Critic
Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
06/24/06 04:07 AM
Top Critic It's very, very talky, and more than a little like a Jane Austen novel in its society-versus-happiness theme. But we're kept intrigued by the characters and where they're heading.
12/10/01 06:30 PM
A film really has to be exceptional to justify a three hour running time, and this isn't.
05/30/01 04:52 PM
Top Critic Top Critic A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
03/03/08 10:26 AM
Top Critic Assayas is masterful in using offscreen sounds to conjure up a novelistic sense of milieu and in handling various ceremonies, and the film's lush texture explains why he called it his anti-Dogma film.
03/03/08 10:24 AM
We're kept intrigued by the characters and where they're heading, and the gorgeous cinematography and production design help us submerge ourselves in their world.
12/06/05 08:02 PM
It is...very good at showing how people can and do change over the course of a lifetime, how faith can be abandoned and then picked up, how love can ebb and mutate.
11/04/02 12:25 PM
An exhausting family drama about a porcelain empire and just as hard a flick as its subject matter.
10/22/02 08:16 AM
More than a few of us would show up for the chance to see and hear Huppert and Beart read from the Limoges telephone directory. Assayas can count himself lucky for that.
09/13/02 02:49 PM
Opens at a funeral, ends on the protagonist's death bed and doesn't get much livelier in the three hours in between.
09/13/02 02:47 PM
Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.
09/13/02 08:30 AM
The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.
09/12/02 05:24 PM
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