Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.
Comment
03/03/08
Les Destinees (2002)
61
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:49
Fresh:30
Rotten:19
Average Rating:6/10
Consensus: The long, epic Les Destinees is too slow and tedious to justify its running time.
Runtime: 2 hrs 54 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
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... [More]
Starring: Emmanuelle Beart, Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Perrier
Director: Olivier Assayas
Reviews for Les Destinees
Top CriticAmbitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
06/24/06
Top CriticIt'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
A film really has to be exceptional to justify a three hour running time, and this isn't.
05/30/01
Top CriticIt's definitely a step in the right direction.
05/30/01
Top CriticA massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
03/03/08
Top CriticAssayas 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
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
No review available.
10/10/05
No review available.
08/20/05
Enduring love but exhausting cinema.
03/26/03
The filmmaker's heart is in the right place...
03/03/03
Click to read the article
12/16/02
An empty shell of an epic rather than the real deal.
11/20/02
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
An exhausting family drama about a porcelain empire and just as hard a flick as its subject matter.
10/22/02
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
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
Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.
09/13/02
The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.
09/12/02
What’s Hot On RT
Other News
Fresh Links
Featured
RT on YouTube 
Subscribe to RT's YouTube channel and don't miss a second of our cracking video content.
RT on Twitter
Follow Rotten Tomatoes and join us as we tweet about the week's releases.
IGN RSS Feeds