Review - Total Eclipse (1995)

This film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Arnold Rimbaud, is very much a puzzler. It recounts Rimbaud's life as a French poet, first searching for truth, and seeking to put it down on paper - then deciding to be the master of silence. His life's aim seems to be to experience "everything in (his) body - it was no longer enough for (him) to be one person - (he) decided to be everyone..(he) decided to orginate the future" - at first, it seems to be for his poetry, but it seems to become something more. To this end, he visits the ocean, and even sets up a trading post in Africa.

Rimbaud: Couldn't care less about being published. The only thing that matters is the writing, itself. Everything else is literature.

The show also focuses on the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine, which I cannot call love. In fact, at one point, Verlaine asks Rimbaud whether he loves him, and gets the reply, "I'm very fond of you." Verlaine, himself, says he loves Rimbaud, but also claims to love his wife, Mathilde. Yet, his acts of violence towards the latter, blamed on his bouts of drunkenness, are frankly quite revolting. He hits her, even when she's pregnant, and once tries to burn her hair. He does clarify, though, that he loves her body, so maybe he's just misunderstanding the term..still, such callous use of the word is irritating.

Rimbaud: Love?
Verlaine: Yes.
Rimbaud: No such thing.
Verlaine: What do you mean?
Rimbaud: Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together - that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist.
Verlaine: You're wrong.
Rimbaud: Self interest exists. Attachment based on personal gain exists. Complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented.

I couldn't agree with Rimbaud less. But the effect he has on Verlaine, driving the latter close to dependent obsession, is quite surprising. They are drawn to each other - it seems to be practical (Rimbaud, who doesn't enjoy working, relies on Verlaine for monetary support - Verlaine seems to think Rimbaud will inspire him, and needless to say, being with another man is probably exciting in its own right), and one never knows whether the two of them have feelings more than fondness for each other. Both are not exclusively homosexual - Verlaine is married, and Rimbaud is shown to have sex with a woman in Africa - and the dynamics of the relationship are complex and hard to pin down. Rimbaud, especially, who seems to play the dominant role, seems to enjoy hurting Verlaine, even driving the latter away once with his hurtful words. They part as Verlaine is sentenced to jail for shooting Rimbaud's hand in a fit of..something, and, unofficially, for sodomy. (Apparently they had medical exams to determine this..) The below scene happens when they meet again after this -

Rimbaud: Then here, in the wilderness, I offer you an archetypal choice. A choice between my body and my soul. Choose. Choose.
Verlaine, who has styled himself a man of God by this time: -inhales- Your body.
Rimbaud: Let the 98 wounds of our Saviour burst and bleed.

Rimbaud leaves Verlaine, rejecting his pleas to convert to Christianity, and travels to Ethiopia. He dies - from a tumour on the knee. (-_- This must be the strangest place to have a tumour I've heard of.) Most of the film is shown as a flashback to when Arthur was alive, such that we end to the point we first started at - Arthur's sister, Isabelle, asking that Paul send her her brother's unpublished manuscripts so she can "decide which will survive". After she leaves, he tears up her card, and orders two glasses of absinthe - leading to a very smooth reenaction of a previous scene, which ends differently, hauntingly, and somehow bittersweetly.

Verlaine: Since he died I see him every night. My great and radiant(?) him. We were always happy, always. I remember.
Rimbaud's Voice: I found it.
Verlaine: What?
Rimbaud: Eternity. It's the sun mingled-with the sea.

One question, though - why is it always that these relationships end so tragically that one has to die, and the other one will be haunted by his ghost either from an article of clothing, or works of art?

Leonardo DiCaprio is fantastic in this movie, though, if only for sheer eye candy. He portrays Rimbaud with an intensity, which, juxtaposed with his youthful appearance, is quite breathtaking. also has hidden talents - which include bones on his back (the ones extending down from one's shoulders) that he seem to be able to manipulate up, down, or together at will, and a very, very convincing imitation of a puppy yapping and growling (he did this to a ceramic dog on the mantle).

Far as it seems, the movie seems pretty true to Rimbaud's actual life - with some dramatic embellishment and rearrangement here and there. All in all, a very confusing, and not very well-linked, show that doesn't seem to have a clear purpose.

Wow. Didn't know Rimbaud was another poet psycho... YLSNED. Leo DiCap seems to like playing intense psychos doesn't he? First Aviator, now this. Or was it this, and then Aviator? And then of course Catch Me if you Can - not an A list, lock 'im up and throw away the key kinda psycho, but still psycho...

Psychos have A lists? XD Yeah, this, then Aviator. He was a psycho in Aviator? -raises an eyebrow- Not sure about Catch Me if you Can...he certainly wasn't very overtly a psycho there, I seem to remember. Or for some reason, I keep confusing that movie with Shattered Glass - and Hayden Christensen is definitely the bigger psycho in that movie. Or Deluded with a capital D.

Howard Hughes had obsessive-compulsive disorders. And he gets progressively psycho as the show goes on. You literally see the great man melting into a mindless puddle. Sad.

Catch Me if you Can... I'd argue that Leo's character (can't recall name) had serious mental issues because a) he felt compelled to bluff his way through life and b) he bluffed his way through life. Not psycho in the chainsaw wielding, straitjacketed kinda way, but slightly psycho nonetheless.

I quarter-watched the Aviator too. Ah well.

Hm, yeah, I seem to remember that bit, and something about counterfeiting notes, but little else about that movie. Sadly.