Cheap Children of the Century (DVD) (Diane Kurys) Price

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Customer Reviews of Children of the Century

I have one major problem with this story line. We know Sand met Musset in the 1830s and that Musset died in 1857, which happens in the movie. But Chopin died in 1849 - and he is never mentioned!! There is a reference to Liszt being a priest im the mid-1850s. That was a bit early. That came around 1860 as I recollected. If the script intended to relay the idea that everytime Sand and Musset fought that they didn't see each other for a number of years at a time, then it was not effective. For one thing, Sand never looked any older and neither did Musset - at all.

Conclusion: George Sand is one of the most interesting women in history. This movie doesn't quite get her right. Neither did it get her right in the movie Impromptu, where we have a completely different Musset. But, in all fairness to the directors and the producers, portraying these "children of the century" along which I would include Chopin, Delacroix, Balzac, Hugo, Liszt, D'Agoult, Berlioz, Gautier, Saint-Beuve, Flaubert (who knew Sand very well), among others, in a movie, would not be an easy feat. So I congratulate them for a good job - half done.

Passion is What it Takes to, One Day, Say "I Have Lived."
You gasp when she gasps. She vexes you when she's mad. She has this inscrutable ability of stealing you from your surroundings by a daring look or a despairing smile. Juliette Binoche. That passionate, vivid woman whose eyes speak to you like the night, and chronicle the tale of natural talent. In 'Les Enfants du Siecle' (Children of the Century) she impersonates George Sand who had inspired Chateaubriand and Herzen and whose works had influenced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Proust. Sand had played a significant role in the novel's evolution. She had called sexual identity and gender destiny into question in her own fiction. A controversial rebel and illustrious romanticist in an era that could espouse Hugo and Lamartine, she defied convention and led off a free-spirited and irreversible way of life for women. "My profession," she once wrote, "is to be free."

The movie recounts her intimate involvement with Alfred de Musset, the poet and playwright attractively played by Benoit Magimel. Musset was a devil-may-care whoremonger and gambler who indulged in opium, but who was also the man who adored her absolutely and could not live without her. He was also the man for whom she had suffered the pain of her lifetime. "Once my heart was captured," she tells, "reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?"

Sand scandalized 19th-century Paris but her voice could not be hushed. She smoked cigars in public, wore male attire, wished to be addressed as "mon frere," and advocated free love in an epoch when men were unconcerned with women's right to physical pleasure. With Alfred, the woman in Sand broke open the cage of the French haute bourgeoisie; he introduced her to desire, passion, and most importantly a love she could not do without no matter how persistently she tried. Unreservedly, she introduced him to herself, a woman made of feeling and courage, a woman who loved him too much. "You taught me to love that way," she tells him. That was enough to disrupt his happy-go-lucky and excessive life forever.

Directed by Diane Kurys (Love After Love & Entre Nous), and whose costumes were made by French couturier Christian Lacroix, the movie glistens in quality and precision, whether that of period interiors, music mood, or supporting performance.

Although Sand had been portrayed before in Judy Davis' 1990 film 'Impromptu' that had explored her love affair with Chopin, 'Les Enfants du Siecle' explores the love that had transformed her life and marked it with an unfogettable moral:

"Love does exist," she confesses in the end. "It's not an illusion. I'm sure of that now. One merely has to recognise it, and be humble before it. We didn't understand it. We parted in the arrogance of youth. We didn't know then what we learnt with time: We only love once with all our soul. Today, I know it. It was him. He was that one time."

But it was too late.

When Passion and Pride Collide...
Diane Kury's sumptuous epic tells the true story of French author George Sand's passionate but brutal affair with poet and dandy Alfred de Musset.

An incredibly romantic and sesual film, Children of the Century follows the pairs relationship more than their lives as authors. Their relationship is presented as a constant stryggle between two behmoths. Binoche Sand is graceful and wise, while Magimel's Musset is possessed with an incredible energy (there might be something to all those Sean Penn comparisons after all). The film follows the lovers to Venice where violence, infidelity and selfishness destroy their relationship.

Kury's film is not particularly interested in the pair as writers, or in the larger literary scene of the time. Instead she recounts a marvellously messy affair in all its glory. Both are seen as selfish, kind and above all proud. The sexual element of their relationship is not shied away from, as Kurys explores how a proto-feminist such as Sand fits into a conventional relationship... Binoche in particular develops Sand with a fine finesse and a calm serenity.

Children of the Century is a fine example of French costume drama and sits well alongside Queen Margot and the Horseman on the Roof, although it's story is not as rousing as those two. However it does not meet to the haunting standard of two heritage classics... Cyrano de Bergerac and Binoche's own Widow of Saint-Pierre...

As a tale of mad, passionate, all consuming amour you cannot miss this movie...