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Rimbaud--First Blood

Photo by Etienne George

Poetic License: Leonardo DiCaprio gets to act up in "Total Eclipse."

A good poet doesn't make a good

person in Agnieszka Holland's Rimbaud

biopic, 'Total Eclipse'

By Richard von Busack

One of the nastiest little bastards ever to pick up a pen, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) defies the bourgeoisie temperament--like mine, for example--to sum him up easily. Was he the great French poet maudit whose modernism presaged 20th-century writing? Or was he a hustler who got his little red wagon fixed for him by the very Africans he tried to exploit--first in verse and later in person, as a typically inept and vicious French colonialist? Those who have received his vision secondhand, through Jim Morrison, Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain, cannot easily free themselves of his attitudes.

In Agnieszka Holland's Total Eclipse, the first punk rocker is seen through his tumultuous relationship with the elder poet Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis, of Naked). For Rimbaud's sake, Verlaine left his pathetic pregnant wife (Romane Bohringer) to cling to a young man who had quite enough of him soon after the affair began. Christopher Hampton's screenplay is full of British malice, casting Verlaine as a damp passive-aggressive who didn't see the ridiculousness of his situation. Verlaine is in a sort of awe before this new creature; he becomes a sodden fool for the youth who manipulates him thoroughly. Meanwhile, Leonard DiCaprio's Rimbaud gives him the works--abusing him to disabuse him, so to speak, to try to free him of his sentiment.

Lush production values help focus on the cruelty of the affair, but this cruelty makes the movie rather hard to watch. The happier moments--Paul and Arthur cavorting in the Alps with goat babies--disclose a sentimentalism that goes against the grain of Rimbaud's writing, a sentimentalism encouraged by stigmata imagery. When Rimbaud was eventually shot at by Verlaine, the bullet scratched his wrist; it didn't leave a huge wound in his palm. Verlaine wasn't that much of a simp; he did write about his quarrel in London with Rimbaud in humorous terms. The scenes in Ethiopia of Rimbaud's final years in Africa are also simplistic; showing the known gun-runner living like a shaman.

Total Eclipse is an atmospheric and engrossing picture, but the relief you feel at emerging from it is palpable. Strip a poet of his poetry, the movie tells us, and you have an asshole; and since this movie doesn't show us what's powerful about the verse, it indeed traps us with a young, pretty and charismatic asshole.

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Total Eclipse (R; 110 Min.), directed by Agnieszka Holland, written by Christopher Hampton, photographed by Yorgos Arvanitis and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis.


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