Les Destinees (2002)
Runtime: 2 hrs 54 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Emmanuelle Beart, Charles Berling, Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Perrier, Julie Depardieu
Screenwriter: Olivier Assayas, Jacques Fieschi
Producer: Bruno Pesery
Composer: Guillaume Lekeu
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.
A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
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.
Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
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.
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.
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.
Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.
The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.
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.
No one is better at putting modern urban life under the microscope than French director Olivier Assayas.


Top Critic