Cheap Eats
By Dan Leone

Our Masthead

Editorial Staff

Business Staff

Jobs & Internships

THE " ;intimate epic," the genre devoted to painting subtle interior landscapes on sweeping, sociohistorical canvases, usually brings to mind the ghosts of European cinema's past heydays (think early Renoir, latter-day Visconti). If Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) proves anything in his long, très literary adaptation of Les destinées, it's that the form is still alive and well, even if the narrative bookends of a funeral and a deathbed eulogy might suggest obvious metaphorical connotations to the contrary. Jean (Charles Berling) is a Protestant minister in a small French town circa 1900 who sends one wife (Isabelle Huppert) away in alleged scandal and later takes another (Emmanuelle Béart) to live a halcyon life in the Swiss Alps. Fate has other plans for Jean, however, as the 20th century intervenes in the form of social and industrial revolutions, a world war, economic collapses, and moral breakdowns. Cramming Jacques Chardonne's three-volume novel into a three-hour movie, Assayas's post-nouvelle vague style suits the material well, devoting his wide screen and Eric Gautier's swooning camerawork to detailing his protagonists' ever-morphing emotional states in lieu of lavish set pieces. Jean's spiritual malaise as an industrialist (manufacturing porcelain for America's burgeoning upper-crust market ... oh, the allusions!) mirrors the modern age's sense of moral purgatory, though the suggestion that love is humanity's one redeeming factor hints that hope still lingers on the historical horizon. Woven with Proustian narrative strands and languidly paced, Les destinées may seem way too stretched out to some, inscrutably dense and archaic to others. Its elegant portraiture of the heart's rise and fall, however, is still undeniably moving enough to strike a chord amid the occasional narrative din. (David Fear)