Agnieszka Holland
Total Eclipse

"What is truly unbearable is that nothing is unbearable."

However, perhaps there is something unbearable, and I hope Rimbaud doesn't mind me contradicting him on this point: that one "throws away" the opportunity to make a film about the legendary poet/visionary of Charleville by reducing his entire work/vision to mere romanticism.

Let me explain: it is undeniable how Rimbaud's fervent mind forever revolutionized the way of doing and thinking about poetry, and how his avant-garde nature initially shocked and confused, and only later fascinated and attracted the poetry-reading world, with his mystical images, his constant exotic references to a hallucinated, imagined, dreamed, and perhaps never deliberately thought-out world, with his firm will to tear apart, revolutionize, and rewrite the poetic dimension through his own genius and the conviction/condition of being "different."

Behind all this, behind the extraordinary ability of the "different" to create worlds for himself, otherworldly realms through the proper use of imagination, the evocative word, and the decision to change the world (be it the world of literature or the real and tangible world, Rimbaud, I believe, cared little) one could have (and still could today, if only there were people up to the task) written an apocalyptic, meaningful film aimed at delineating in the best possible way the face (allow me this poetic license) of the true Arthur Rimbaud.

But no. The theme of the film is 95% centered on the love story (or friendship, depending on the points of view) between the very young Arthur and the more "experienced" Paul Verlaine, particularly on the "madness" of the latter, stunned and at the same time delighted by the novelties that the younger colleague was bringing to his visionary capabilities and his (quoting Rimbaud himself) "reasoned unruliness," to the point of abandoning his wife and newborn child, only to plunge into total disorientation and chronic alcoholism.

We are not really shown Rimbaud's genius, except in very small doses: what seems to matter most to the Polish director is to show the "obscenities" derived from the scandal that the homosexual couple caused in an era and society still mentally closed and bigoted; of Rimbaud's life before arriving in Paris, of his difficult childhood without a father, the strict severity of his mother, his poetic experiences in school, and his intimate and fundamental relationship with the master d'Izambard, nothing is mentioned, so much so that the young man seems to appear out of nowhere, just like that, poof.

And precisely for this reason, the film was a tremendous disappointment for me: only two excellent performances are saved (a fresh-faced Di Caprio as Rimbaud and a superlative David Thewlis as Verlaine).

A good fiction, but if you want to make a film about Rimbaud, dear Agnieszka, you should put in a bit more effort.