Total Eclipse

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Total Eclipse is a 1995 film directed by Agnieszka Holland, based on a 1967 play by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay. Based on letters and poems, it presents a historically accurate account of the passionate and violent relationship between the two 19th-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud , at a time of soaring creativity for both of them.

Long before there were rock stars, there was rock star attitude, as displayed with spectacular insolence by the teen-age French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud's long shadow reaches not only into academe, where the writing he did before abandoning poetry at 20 is still much admired, but also into popular culture, where Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison or Patti Smith would not have been possible without him.

In 1871, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), an established poet, invites boy genius Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) to live with Paul and his young pregnant wife, Mathiltde, in her father's home in Paris. Rimbaud's uncouth behavior disrupts the household as well as the insular society of French poets, but Verlaine finds the youth invigorating. Stewed in absinthe and resentment, Verlaine abuses Mathiltde; he and Rimbaud become lovers and abandon her. There are reconciliations and partings with Mathiltde and partings and reconciliations with Rimbaud, until an 1873 incident with a pistol sends one of them to prison. Codas dramatize the poets' final meeting and last illnesses.

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Financial numbers from the movie.

Audience Score 61%

There is a story, perhaps true, that when Bennett Cerf visited James Joyce in Paris, he told Nora Joyce, "Your husband is a great man." To which Nora replied, "You don't have to live with the bloody fool." Mathilde Verlaine, wife of the French poet Paul Verlaine, might have used the same words - in French, of course - had she ever met Bennett Cerf. What else can one say of a husband who cheerfully reports, "I haven't set fire to her since Thursday"? "Total Eclipse" tells the story of Verlaine's long-running beastliness to his wife, and of his love affair with the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud, which ended disastrously, with Verlaine spending two years in a Belgian prison on sodomy charges, and Rimbaud fleeing to Abyssinia to spend 10 years in the desert before returning to France with a fatal tumor of the knee.

Directed by Agnieszka Holland. With Leonardo DiCaprio, David Thewlis, Romane Bohringer, Dominique Blanc. Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.

Total Eclipse is a 1995 film directed by Agnieszka Holland, based on a 1967 play by Christopher Hampton, who also wrote the screenplay. Based on letters and poems, it presents a historically accurate account of the passionate and violent relationship between the two 19th-century French poets Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio), at a time of soaring creativity for both of them.