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
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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.
Theatrical Release:Apr 5, 2002 Limited
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
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Reviews for Les Destinees
A 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
Top CriticAmbitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
06/24/06
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
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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
Top CriticOpens 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
Top CriticGorgeous 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
Top CriticDeath awaits us all, but Assayas, with a humanist's generosity, offers his characters the greatest gift art can give: immortality.
09/09/02
Rich in detail, gorgeously shot and beautifully acted, Les Destinees is, in its quiet, epic way, daring, inventive and refreshingly unusual.
08/30/02
No one is better at putting modern urban life under the microscope than French director Olivier Assayas.
08/06/02
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