Synopsis
Total Eclipse (1995) is Agnieszka Holland's literary drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A teenage stranger shows up at poet Paul Verlaine's door clutching a notebook of verse, and nothing in Verlaine's settled life survives the visit.
The boy is Arthur Rimbaud, and Leonardo DiCaprio plays him years before Titanic made him a household name. David Thewlis takes Verlaine. What grows between them wrecks Verlaine's marriage and drags both men out of Paris into London and Brussels, into absinthe, poverty and a gunshot that lands one of them in prison. Playwright Christopher Hampton adapted his own stage play, and he refuses to make either poet likeable — they are as cruel as they are gifted.
A France–Belgium–UK co-production, the film trades costume-drama warmth for cold northern light and bilingual dialogue. This is the unglamorous version of the legend: two artists who burned through their lives for a handful of years of brilliant poetry. Best suited to viewers who love 19th-century verse and can stomach the ugliness behind it. Stream Total Eclipse (1995) online on iFILM.
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