BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Steineded How sad is this?

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

ljp-2 I'm a great admirer of George Sand's works, so I was curious about this film, and have been ever since I heard that it came out in France in 1999. I finally got a chance to see it two weeks ago in New York. Diane Kurys' film is well-acted and beautifully shot. Unfortunately, viewers won't be much enlightened about Sand or Musset as writers by watching it. Nor is it a convincing love story. Both of these faults are mostly due to a mediocre script.The basic outline of the facts of Sand's relationship with Musset are there, but any sense of *why* they had such a fatal obsession with each other is lacking. Lots of inane dialogue about love isn't enough! The two are barely together before they're fighting, and Musset is such an unpleasant, selfish, manipulative and immature fellow (a characterization that's apparently pretty true to the facts) that Sand's devotion to him is hard to fathom. Surprisingly, from a filmmaker with a feminist slant, you learn very little about Sand's beliefs as a woman or an artist. She seems like a sane person, though, and a hard-working writer (and that is historically accurate), but there's no depth, in spite of all that the lovely, talented Juliet Binoche can do. The character as written simply isn't interesting, and that's sad, because the real life George Sand was a fascinating woman. The film's portrait of the Romantic era and its writers isn't much better. Yes, I suppose with all the bad behavior and opium-gulping, Musset and some others were like the childish, spoiled rock stars of today (which may have been the filmmaker's point), but there's no sense of what their work was like. When Sand and Musset talk about their writing and its meaning, they sound like rank amateurs. The one thing you learn about Sand's novel *Lelia* from the film is that it was about female frigidity and how few men are capable of arousing a woman. (Naturally, Musset soon cures Sand of her "frigidity." Hoo-boy). In reality, *Lelia* is a complex attempt to address many philosophical issues of the age and a struggle to find the meaning of existence, with or without God, but that doesn't make good cinema, I guess. It's easier to suppose that women are always going to write about sex, rather than to admit that they have any ideas of their own. If you want real insight, you'd be far better off reading Sand's works (something like her most magnificent short story, "The Marquise," for starters). Or how about calling a moratorium on films about Sand's love life and actually bringing one of her works to the screen? That would be a real tribute.

Zzaz82 Being French, I saw this film at its release. I had no idea about what I might find except that Juliette Binoche was in it. I went there alone. I came out in a crowd.Romanticism isn't what we think it is. This story IS romantic, not because it's a love story, but because it's a Romantics's story. George Sand and Alfred de Musset were two of our greatest writers. Their works were full of hope, of despair, of melancholy and bitterness. They were revolutionaries. This film is all about the atmosphere of that time, all about the fights and ambitions of these young writers who wanted to change the world and find an unclear future.This film is one of the few that changed my life, not because of the way it was filmed, or the performance of the actors (though they were absolutely fabulous and I'm looking forward to their next films), it changed my perception of life, made me read some Romantic works (by Sand, Musset, Hugo, Lamartine,... and that's only for the French ones) where I found a "translation" of what I feel when I look to the world in front of me.That's what this film is all about. It's not a film about a past true story, it's about all of us, everyday.

Ian Turner At the beginning of the film Alfred when commenting on a play by George observes that the lead character must die, with in a relatively short time i was having similar thoughts about Alfred. This may or may not be an historically accurate film but the story wasn't suitable for a film as despite being about the love affair between two people it managed to be remarkably lacking in passion (Remains of the Day being far more passionate despite being about two characters repressing it for the whole film). Neither character could be deemed to be sympathetic as Alfred was a selfish child and George was just annoying with her insistance on returning to the man who loved to strangle her at regular intervals.

badger-37 I saw this film in French with Spanish subtitles so I had to read very fast! The photography is beautiful. I had not seen either of the principal actors before but I will look for them again. Miss Binoche made George Sand a real person not just an odd woman! The actor who played Alfred de Musset, showed him as charming but weak, very well done.