Les Destinées (2000)
Average Rating: 6/10
Reviews Counted: 49
Fresh: 30 | Rotten: 19
The long, epic Les Destinees is too slow and tedious to justify its running time.
Average Rating: 6/10
Critic Reviews: 20
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 8
The long, epic Les Destinees is too slow and tedious to justify its running time.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 650
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Movie Info
Acclaimed French filmmaker Olivier Assayas follows up on the international success of Fin Août, Début Septembre and Irma Vep with this sweeping adaptation of the sprawling three-volume tome by Jacques Chardonne. Set in three chapters spanning from the beginning of the 1900s to after WWI, the first section takes place in the fictional village of Barbazac, located in the Cognac region. Protestant pastor Jean Barnery (Charles Berling) learns of his wife Nathalie's (Isabelle Huppert) infidelity from
Cast
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Emmanuelle Béart
Pauline -
Charles Berling
Jean Barnery -
Isabelle Huppert
Nathalie -
Olivier Perrier
Philippe Pommerel -
Dominique Reymond
Julie Desca -
André Marcon
Paul Desca -
Alexandra London
Louise Desca -
Julie Depardieu
Marcelle -
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All Critics (51) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (30) | Rotten (19) | DVD (2)
A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
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.
Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
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.
Opens at a funeral, ends on the protagonist's death bed and doesn't get much livelier in the three hours in between.
The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.
Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.
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.
Enduring love but exhausting cinema.
The filmmaker's heart is in the right place...
An empty shell of an epic rather than the real deal.
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.
An exhausting family drama about a porcelain empire and just as hard a flick as its subject matter.
Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.
Death awaits us all, but Assayas, with a humanist's generosity, offers his characters the greatest gift art can give: immortality.
Rich in detail, gorgeously shot and beautifully acted, Les Destinees is, in its quiet, epic way, daring, inventive and refreshingly unusual.
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Foreign Titles
- Les Destinées sentimentales (DE)
- Les Destinees Sentimenatales (UK)
[font=Century Gothic][color=#0000ff][/color][/font]
[font=Century Gothic][color=red]"Les Destinees" is an epic drama that starts in 1900 with a funeral(for the 19th century?) and continues until 1930. It focuses on a protestant minister, Jean Barnery(Charles Berling) who is in exile from his prosperous family of porcelain makers and his relationship with a young woman, Pauline(Emmanuelle Beart). At the start of the movie, Barnery is in the process of separating from his wife, due to an unspecified scandal. The movie tries to be a sprawling epic but we never learn much about any characters except for Jean and Pauline. All the other characters just seem extraneous and come and go as they please. But on the other hand, we did learn a great deal of how to make pottery and bourbon.[/color][/font]