Les Destinees

A couple's epic romance plays out against the backdrop of an empire built around porcelain in Olivier Assayas' Les Destinées. Beginning in 1900 and stretching through the Great War and American Depression, the film follows Pauline (Emmanuelle Beart) and Jean (Charles Berling) as they try to be lovers, humanists, and industrialists at the dawn of modernism. As sumptuous as the costumes and scenery are, however, the movie never forgets the clash between the social elite and the working class. Still, some will find this slow going: never before has so much celluloid been dedicated to the manufacturing and selling of porcelain. Does Assayas intend for the fragile plates and saucers to serve as a metaphor for the fragility of love? Or does he use the expensive superficiality of the porcelain as a symbolic representation of the dying aristocracy? Or--since Assayas' Irma Vep blasted the effect of American commercialism on French cinema--does the film's message that the manufacturers should make quality porcelain for the French, rather than shoddy materials for export, carry over to movies as well? With passionate performances from the stunning Beart, Berling, and Isabelle Huppert as Berling's obsessive ex-wife, it's possible to forget that Assayas has perhaps simply made a three-hour costume drama about glazed ceramics. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by writer-director Olivier Assayas and film critic Ken Jones, text filmographies, trailers, and web links (including one to an interview with Assayas). Bottom line: a so-so extras package for a solid epic.] (D. Fienberg)