#this is Entirely off topic but the whole thing reminds me of that scene from skyfall | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

linklethehistorian · 1 year

Text

Total Eclipse (1995) — A Movie Review by linklethehistorian (Post 3/4)

(Continuation of review placed under the cut for length and spoilers; proceed at your own risk.)

The Bad

Casting & Acting

I honestly can’t think of anything much ‘bad’ to say in this section that isn’t completely nitpicking; as I mentioned in the previous section, I actually think that on the whole, the cast was very well chosen and the skill level of the main actors is stellar. Even in regards to more minor and background characters, I can still only find a few of their performances to be subpar at absolute worst, and I don’t think that’s really anything worth talking about.

I guess if you asked me to go over the entire ensemble with a fine-toothed comb and find something I thought was genuinely off about one of them in any way, I would have to say that, based on the only existing glimpses we have at Mathilde Maute’s true visage through surviving photos, I think Romane Bohringer is far too conventionally attractive by the modern standard to really make for a convincing close physical approximation of the woman she is portraying, but that is truly me splitting straws because she’s too good of an actor to find any major flaws in her performance and I can’t come up with a problem among any of the others, either.

There is one moment I can bring to mind in scene 39 — during which Rimbaud and Verlaine are on a ship headed towards England — that I feel a single line of DiCaprio’s acting felt extraordinarily weak (particularly the moment in which he says “Oh…my God”), but I’m unsure if this is actually the actor’s fault, or that of the director’s for not trying to get another take and just going with that particular cut anyway.

Writing & Script

Alright, well…this section is probably going to be a bit of a difficult and messy one to tackle, unfortunately; you see, the problem I find as I finally sit down to write this section is that much of what really ought to be discussed in this subsection also happens to belong to another — given that a great deal of this film’s issues lie with things intrinsically tied to its notable lack of historical accuracy.

After a great deal of painstaking debating and procrastination by writing out literally every other subsection within “The Bad” except these two, though, I have finally come to what I believe is a reasonable solution: I will use this subsection to talk only about those issues which are the more broad and/or narrative and technical ones, and which are not intrinsically tied to the authenticity of the events and natures being portrayed, and I will use the “Overall Historical Accuracy” subsection to discuss those issues which are inherently bound to how genuine the ‘facts’ and characterizations within Total Eclipse tend to be.

So, with that settled, I guess let’s get started with my first topic of interest for this area: the script’s occasional inconsistency with its own chosen narrative.

Numerous times within this movie, the writing will initially state a certain ‘fact’ that it seems it would earnestly like its audience to believe, only to sooner or later completely contradict itself through another statement or action — and no, I am not talking about the times where it is intentionally using some form of disconnect between a character’s words and their actions to point out their hypocrisy; that definitely is something that is done throughout Total Eclipse and done very well, but those instances are always very clear in their purpose and in no way similar to the obvious slip-ups and oversights to which I refer here.

For instance, in the very first scene ever shown to us, there is a voiceover from Paul Verlaine quoting a certain part of A Season in Hell’s ‘The Infernal Spouse’ — a poem which, I remind you, was widely believed to be written from the perspective of Paul about Rimbaud — in order to tell us of the alleged reasoning behind his fascination with the young poet that we see on screen; even as we see the teen take a huge, obnoxious bite of an apple as he stares out a window, and then eventually strangely decides to leap mid-trip from the train he had boarded into a river far below, Verlaine assures us through his monologue of all of Arthur’s best and most redeemable qualities: his gentleness, his grace, his kindness and innocence — something that we essentially never get to actually see, whether in this scene itself, or the entire movie as a whole.

Yep, that’s right; if you thought that this line of dialogue would have any value whatsoever to the rest of the contents of this cinematic ‘masterpiece’, or even come into play at any point at all, you’d be wrong, because there is absolutely no part of Total Eclipse where we see this side of Rimbaud ever — or are even given any reason to believe that it exists, for that matter. (Unless, of course, you intend to count the two few-second long, dialogue-less moments in which he silently drops a few coins into the hand of a man on crutches in an alleyway, emotionlessly, to which the man barely reacts (in the third scene), or the time in which he briefly embraces and kisses Paul when they reach the ocean (in the thirty-first scene), but I would personally consider that to be something of a stretch.)

Indeed, if this movie was attempting to try out the inversion of the saying ‘show, don’t tell’, and prove to its viewers in doing so that such tactics really can work effectively in storytelling, then the results of that experiment backfired spectacularly in everyone’s faces, and only served to prove precisely why moves like that are generally considered a terrible choice in the first place.

…And if it wasn’t meaning to do anything of the sort, then I would strongly suggest to the creator(s) of the script that from now on they either learn to refrain from choosing quotes that directly conflict with their preferred narrative, or actually include some form of meaningful content that backs up the statement within the material they decided to use.

As for other examples of general writing and plot inconsistencies besides this, we can most certainly take a look at one particular line in scene 40, where Arthur says to Paul that he had chosen him as a partner in his creative endeavors for a reason, for although Rimbaud himself always knew what he wanted to say, Verlaine knew how to say it — and as such, he was able to learn a lot from him during their time together.

This line in and of itself would be all well and good, if it didn’t directly contradict another line of dialogue from much earlier in the film (scene 5, to be exact), where it is established firmly into this movie’s interpretation of Rimbaud’s character that he does not believe that poets can learn from each other unless they are bad poets, and that he does not think himself to be a bad poet.

If, as a matter of fact, this somehow is meant to be an attempt at pointing out some form of hypocrisy in the younger poet like they have done with his elder lover countless times before, then it is, quite frankly, a piss-poor one; after all, unlike in all of the other cases surrounding Paul, where the blunt teenager lost no time in calling out his lies and stating things for what they really were, Rimbaud is strangely never confronted about or even looked at a teeny bit differently by his partner for this conflicting statement at all — and this has nothing to do with their natures simply being different, as the Parisian author is much more than willing to accuse him of other things later on with far less proof, so the only truly logical conclusion one can come to about this scene is that the writers merely forgot they had ever established differently in the first place, and never checked back thoroughly enough to find out.

Likewise, in what feels like potentially a similar — yet also somehow nearly opposite — moment of incompetence, some of Verlaine’s dialogue in one of the final scenes of the movie (scene 62, specifically) references Arthur being at fault for Paul’s arrest, which, although very historically accurate, is neither established nor even remotely implied by this film at any point throughout it; as a matter of fact, given that the actual event that lead to Verlaine’s apprehension by the police was entirely omitted by Total Eclipse (more on this later) and replaced with someone barging into their hotel room shortly after Paul shot Rimbaud’s hand, anyone not already familiar with their true life story would be made to believe quite the opposite.

As such, the only way that this statement can possibly not be taken as a complete contradiction to the plot is if you choose to ignore all of the context surrounding it and twist the meaning to something less literal — such as that the older poet is saying it is his paramour’s fault that he ended up in jail because the boy tried to leave in the first place, thus “forcing” Verlaine into shooting him, or because he for some reason sees Arthur as the sole one to blame for the fact they were ever romantically involved to begin with, and their involvement was what indirectly lead to the arrest. Granted, although these may be absurd claims for anyone to try to make in his position, I suppose it really wouldn’t be beyond someone like Paul to do it anyway, but I do think that working this hard to wave off what is very clearly a major inconsistency in the writing and intended flow of the story is a little bit more pardoning than the writers deserve to be given.

Sadly, this apparent indecision with the tale’s direction and failure to clean up the loose ends of the abandoned plot elements is something that does not end with this one fumble alone, either, as throughout scenes 29, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 58, and 62, we are constantly presented with what appears to be many different leftover scraps of potential paths they considered taking in regards to the reason why Arthur eventually loses his ability and will to write; the most logical and close to historical accuracy of these — that the teen very simply became more and more jaded, disillusioned, frustrated and depressed throughout the course of his and Paul’s stressful, on-and-off again relationship and gave up completely in the aftermath of the end of it — is unfortunately the one which, although almost seeming to be set up now and again, is pushed down the most in favor of the more abstract and absurd “explanations” that are hinted at, such as Rimbaud constantly forseeing the near-end of his own life in Africa in the far future and having it start to consume him after he sees the boat to said continent while in London, and the most boring of all excuses, that it was something inexplicable that “just happened” for no particular rhyme or reason despite any of these other surrounding factors giving us every reason to believe that there was, in fact, a cause behind his fading inspiration and change of behavior.

Perhaps my ‘favorite’ scene of all in regards to this is the ridiculous one in which, shortly after having stated that he considered putting his affair partner in a position where he would literally be sent to jail just so that he himself could possibly eventually re-unite with Mathilde, Verlaine, in a moment of utter obliviousness to his own bullshit, comments that Arthur is no longer acting the same way that he used to, and asks him what’s wrong, and the script then chooses in spite of the obvious and most likely answer to have the young poet respond that it’s “the writing” that has changed him. Yeah — try and make sense of that one.

The ultimate reason for Rimbaud’s death, too, almost seems to have been something they considered at one point changing in some manner, as I find it odd that they thought it relevant to show and emphasize him getting an injury on his knee while exploring in Africa, coincidentally in the exact same place where he later developed the tumor that would take his life — unless, of course, they somehow mean to imply that the wound lead to it forming, which is, to my admittedly limited understanding of medical knowledge, a pretty farfetched claim, to be honest.

Barring that bizarre logic, I can only really assume that perhaps they may have originally considered having him simply die of some sort of infection, for whatever reason, before they eventually changed their minds and decided to be more historically accurate — or, who knows, maybe they never had any other sorts of plans at all, and rather than being a leftover bit they decided to keep from an earlier version of the script, the injury was just some unrelated sub-plot they intended to have all along; whatever the case, though, I personally think that it was a terrible decision to include it, as it just makes the entire situation a whole lot more confusing, considering the extremely convenient placing of the wound.

Something else that I find rather annoying and disappointing about this film is the way in which it handles Arthur’s brilliance as a creative; yes, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed from some of what I’ve said in previous sections and subsections, if for any reason you approached this film with the hope that it would not lean into the horridly overused “geniuses are all extremely quirky and raving mad” cliché, rest assured that you will be severely disappointed in every way imaginable.

From spending three scenes making sounds like and mimicking dogs and goats, to unzipping and pissing on someone from atop a table with a sword-cane in his hand, there are many wild, out-of-left-field, historically unbacked ‘antics’ which happen throughout Total Eclipse for seemingly no other reason than to paint the teen as a thousand times more insane and over-the-top than he truly was.

Unfortunately, this tendency towards theatrics over truth most often results in not only the dehumanization of Rimbaud (which I will discuss further in the Historical Accuracy section), but also just some very weird, awkward, inhuman, and/or incomprehensible moments as a whole.

I sincerely appreciated the attempt at showing genuine, heartfelt frustration from him in scene 32, after he wakes up to find Paul sneaking out of their shared bed to reunite with his wife, for example, but the way that they have him quickly kind of punch his own hand once in anger somehow honestly feels to me less like a sincere display of strong emotion and more an almost cartoonish moment where one would expect a villain to be saying, “Blast! Foiled again!”

Many of the attempts at quoting his poetry as directly as possible within the character dialogue, too, although perhaps noble in intention, falls to this same fatal issue of creating some very robotic, unnatural-feeling exchanges.

Scene six, for instance, where Arthur and his much older companion debate the general topic and existence of love, quickly becomes very inhuman, as the youth monologues the entirety of his famous “Love…no such thing” quote, pausing to allow Verlaine to speak his rebuttal partway through, but then completely and utterly ignoring what he says to finish the rest in a way that feels very awkward and out of place for any real human interaction — never to address his words for the whole remainder of the scene.

Now, I don’t dislike the inclusion of this quote or the overall concept behind this scene by any means, but it — like many other ‘reference’ scenes and lines throughout the film — would be much better off if the dialogue was instead written in such a manner that the characters were more paraphrasing the things they were giving a strong nod to than directly quoting them nearly word for word, thus leaving a lot more room for the special homages they wished to pay to actually fit and flow with the rest of the conversations around them naturally and comfortably.

Trying to overambitiously cram as many tiny bits and pieces of Arthur’s actual works and sayings into the film even where it does not make sense or is clearly being forced purely for the sake of it — such as distastefully making said poet deliriously ramble off random quotes from the Infernal Spouse on his deathbed, or having him go through an entire cringeworthy interaction with a random dog statue in Mathilde’s family’s home just so he can later say the “dogs are all liberals” line to her father — is just plain embarrassing to watch more than it is pleasing as an Easter Egg within the dialogue.

Perhaps my least favorite example of this is the way that after stabbing Paul’s hand in scene 27, the script then has Arthur state in a dull, cold, monotone voice that “the only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable”, which, although one of my favorite Rimbaud quotes, here just seems to come out of nowhere, and appears to have absolutely no real significance to the rest of the scene, besides that the writers apparently thought it would sound ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ (and although I will grant them that it does sound edgy, I would sooner consider it terribly cringe-inducing than I would ever call it ‘cool’).

And speaking of their poetry, I sure would like to know what the creators’ obsession was with the Infernal Spouse; I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s actually one of my most beloved Rimbaud pieces that exist, but I think that quoting it — what? — three or four times throughout the movie when so many others don’t get even a single homage (there are really only four or five referenced pieces that I counted in total) does seem a bit like overkill. I do have a theory on why that might be the case, but…well, we’ll get to that later.

It should also probably be noted that, although I am by no means an expert on Verlaine’s poetry (I know a good deal about his life story, even if not quite as much as I do Rimbaud’s, but I have primarily only ever read Rimbaud’s works thus far), I could not spot even one single reference to any of his works in the same vein as is done for his lover — though again, I could be mistaken.

While not necessarily related to much of the above, or even anything else I will be talking about here — besides perhaps just fitting into the ‘strange’ and ‘unnatural’ interaction theme in general — I also would simply like to say that I find it incredibly awkward that despite Verlaine and Rimbaud’s romantic and intimate involvement throughout pretty much this entire film, only Arthur is ever seen calling Paul by his first name, and never the other way around; in fact, Verlaine never even calls him by his last name at any point, either — an extremely strange writing choice for a film that centers itself around their affair and typically tries to present Paul as the more clingy, familiar, lovey-dovey and sentimental partner, but I suppose at this point we’ve already established that the lead creators of Total Eclipse rather suck at making anything that feels remotely sane or natural.

Even the cuts between scenes and the arrangement of them — all historical inaccuracies completely aside for the time being — often feel very whiplash-inducing, and while some of that is likely the editors to blame (as I explain in greater detail in a later subsection), the fault cannot be placed solely upon their shoulders, for the writers are very clearly a large part of the problem on this front, too.

The editors can certainly make things even worse, yes, through inconsistency and an overall poor exercise of their skills in the precise placement and style of cuts used, as well as sound-mixing and other audio and visual matters, but the authors of a script are ultimately the ones who most typically decide and control how a scene ends and which one comes next, as well as what takes place within it.

As I later state in the Filming & Editing section, there are many moments in this which are extremely hard to follow thanks to the placement of the scenes every bit as much as the editing later done to them; massive leaps in time are made on multiple occasions from one scene to the next, and all with little explanation other than the rare helping of a poorly placed title card of the year and location and, if you’re extremely lucky, a few throwaway, poorly explained lines indicating a vague idea of what had happened in between the two scenes to lead the characters to where they are now — usually not, though.

And some of these larger jumps in time aren’t just extremely hard to keep up with or unclarified in their events, they’re sometimes also emotionally jarring due to the complete, instantaneous mood change that happens between scenes — perhaps the most bizarre and unintentionally, morbidly hilarious of these being the time when the movie cuts from Arthur violently stabbing Paul in the hand in a bar and coldly watching him scream in pain to them being in the middle of having very intense sex in Arthur’s room and then fairly peacefully cuddling up in bed; that was definitely a very…interesting decision to make for the script, to put it politely. Truly, it was a…choice — perhaps even one of the choices ever made.

Additionally, there are many other scenes here that just probably shouldn’t have been included to begin with — not even necessarily because there is any deeply offensive content in any of them, but rather, purely because they don’t seem to serve any logical purpose other than taking up space as a bunch of mindless filler that mostly isn’t even that much fun to watch.

A lot of them are really just quite short, pointless, and (at least in terms of what constitutes the baseline for ‘normal’ content in this film, which isn’t always saying very much) mundane in nature, and leave you feeling as if you’ve walked away with absolutely nothing particularly gained from seeing them, but even the two main examples I can think of that seemed like maybe they were at least trying to establish something vaguely important just…fell completely flat on their faces and left me feeling extremely confused, which is why they ended up in this ‘meaningless’ category from the start.

One of these is scene 41, in which Paul and Arthur have a brief discussion about their greatest fears; one would think, given most of the focus of this scene being placed solely on this part of the conversation, that this little exchange was meant to be something profound and deeply important to their characters, but the reality sadly ends up being much more shallow and befuddling. I mean, perhaps in the eyes of the writer, this was meant to be some grand reveal that deepened both of their characterizations greatly, but the audio is so soft and poor-quality here when it comes to Thewlis’ lines that Verlaine’s answer to his lover’s question is difficult to truly make out, and the only thing that one can seem to make of it (which I discussed earlier in the “Writing & Script” subsection of the previous section) is completely absurd and impossible to take seriously, and as for Rimbaud’s revealed fear — “That other people will see me as I see them” — setting aside the apparent contradiction with the fact that Arthur has never really expressed much care of how others perceive him, although it at first does seem like an interesting statement with a lot of potential for depth if expanded upon and explored, it is unfortunately very quickly thrown away for a subject change the moment it is said, and then never brought up again.

It is almost as if the script considered for a moment that it might like to explore its characters and add a deeper layer of humanity to them, but then realized that it would require too much care and effort and just decided to toss out some surface level, throwaway lines that people can interpret however they want and leave it at that.

The deeply overdramatic scene 47 is the only other one out of this bunch that I found to maybe have been intended to have some deeper purpose beyond just showing that he had developed writer’s block, given the enigmatic nature of the scene and the apparent ties to that whole strange “foresight into one’s own death” subplot for Arthur, but at the end of the day, I just find it too confusing to make a lot of sense of the rest of the strange elements within it; what exactly is that spillage that suddenly appears out of nowhere to ruin the page he is working on — is it ink? If it is, I don’t know where it came from, and it’s awfully red for that to be the case. Is it blood? That doesn’t really make sense; he doesn’t seem to be visibly injured in the scene. Are they suggesting he’s hallucinating? Is it supposed to be in some way tied to his vision of Africa and the end of his life? Is it meant to be his blood? He didn’t die from anything relating to blood loss, really — although I guess some bone cancers are technically tied to blood. I don’t know. I really just found the whole thing extremely confusing and honestly unnecessary to have as some sort of barely addressed supernatural sub-plot in general.

Maybe the feelings about that last scene is just me, though; maybe some people enjoyed it. All I know is I think it detracts and distracts from the real issues that were actually going on in his life at this point in time.

And lastly for this subsection, while we’re on the subject of things that are way out of touch with reality even within the rest of its own narrative, I’m not at all fond of the way that this movie’s ending was written. Don’t get me wrong — having Arthur’s spirit (which presents itself at the same age as when he and Verlaine were having their affair) visit Paul every night after his death and even come and kiss his hand in broad daylight at the bar after Isabelle leaves is an extremely romantic and happy ending, all things considered, but that is exactly why it is terrible; part of the more intricate details of this I will be saving to discuss in the Overall Historical Accuracy subsection, but even with that and all of the lies thrown into this film to make things look more romantic and forgivable aside for now, the bottom line is that this story should by no means have a happy ending. It absolutely should not end with the implication that because Paul did one decent thing to preserve Arthur’s legacy, then that suddenly erases years of terrible, horridly selfish actions towards both him and Mathilde and means that now he deserves to be loved and respected by — and even find everlasting happiness with — the teenager that he literally tried to murder.

There are a lot of things I would love to say right now in regards to this completely wild and vomit-inducing decision, but since I’m setting all of that aside for the Historical Accuracy subsection, for now I will just have it suffice to say that I think it is absolutely batshit insane.

Costumes & Scenery

Much like with what I stated in the “Casting & Acting” subsection, I don’t really have a lot to say in this category that isn’t praise; the only thing I can truly think of at the moment that I took any issue with in regards to any of this was very simply that I saw no moment throughout any part of this two hour film in which Rimbaud wears his signature bowtie — you know, the unique style he literally invented?

Yeah, it’s a minor thing, but I’m still kind of peeved about it, to be honest; surely, it wouldn’t have been that hard to achieve.

Music & Sound Effects

My sole complaint here is something that only genuinely happens twice: there’s this particular sharp, brief swell in the music that happens both in the library while Arthur is struggling to write in scene 43 and later when Paul purchases a gun and is loading it at a table along the streets of London in scene 53, which almost mimics what one would expect to hear in a horror film, and thus induces the same expectation of an upcoming jumpscare or something truly horrifying about to happen.

You could perhaps try to make the argument that this is at least fitting for the latter moment, given that Verlaine is about to return to the hotel and shoot his partner, but the prior usage of it in an otherwise relatively uneventful scene and the lack of clearly established pre-meditation (since they imply the drunken Parisian only intended it for himself originally), coupled together with the scene change and the rather long conversation between the loading of the weapon and the actual shooting, just makes it all feel very overdone, deeply anti-climactic, and just plain awkward, cringeworthy, and out of place.

Other than that, everything is honestly fine in this department.

Editing & Filming

I really don’t want to be unnecessarily harsh on the camera crew involved in this endeavor, as I don’t know how many of the decisions for what to do with the different scenes were actually theirs to make, if any at all; yes, there were a few moments here or there where I thought things could have been done a little bit better than they were, and a handful of times when I thought the recently acquired film maybe should have been rewatched enough to realize that the actors should have been directed to speak a little bit louder, but on the whole I don’t really want to place blame on people who were clearly doing their best to capture what they were told to capture, quite possibly the way they were told to capture it.

As far as I’m concerned, however, the same excuse cannot really be made for the editors and those who were tasked with overseeing the editing process — and this, apart from the writing and the historical accuracy, is unfortunately where Total Eclipse tends to fail the most.

As I mentioned very briefly before, there are some instances in the supposedly ‘finished’ product where the editors seem to have decided to give up halfway and awkwardly transition or just outright cut to the next scene when the main characters are clearly still mid-dialogue. Not only that, but the scene changes in general — comprised of a very strange mix of ordinary scene cuts, unexpectedly abrupt jump cuts, and extremely awkward fade transitions — are often deeply confusing to follow, if not entirely jarring to experience; thanks in part to the writing just as much as the editing, scenes often feel very incomplete and/or short enough to leave the viewer either wondering what their point was or give them a sense of whiplash as the location or emotions of characters change vastly and without much explanation from one moment to the next, and even the occasional — and devastatingly sparse, for a movie that features a lot of travel across many cities and countries — title card to tell one where and when a scene takes place sometimes only seems to appear when one is already halfway through a scene, rendering its usefulness in clearing up any shock or confusion almost moot.

Even for someone as intimately knowledgeable about the true events this film is based on as myself, Total Eclipse at times proved to be extremely hard to follow and keep up with just what exactly was going on — and although this is partly due to the many historical inaccuracies involved and the creative liberties taken within the script, the editing crew and their overseers absolutely did not help by any measure with the bizarre choices they made when putting all of the material they had together into a complete movie.

All in all, I genuinely believe I could have gotten a better job done with the editing just from spending an hour playing around in the iMovie app, with no professional degrees to my name, than the actual editors were able to manage in God knows how long.

‘Mature’ Content

Listen, I know this movie is apparently categorized as an “erotic historic drama”, and I’m not saying there’s anything inherently wrong with that; in fact, I’ve already stated before that I genuinely do think that a few of the more sexually charged scenes legitimately contribute something of value to the film, in terms of establishing character motivation and personality, and sometimes even historical accuracy (we know that Rimbaud did, in fact, briefly streak one time as depicted in scene 15, more or less).

…Even so, do the main three characters — especially Rimbaud and Verlaine — really have to be in some state of undress as often as they are?

Seriously, the amount of times the characters are either half-naked or just completely nude in this film is venturing way out of the realm of just uncensored honesty or even an attempt to be ‘sexy’ and into just plain absurdity; there are many times where Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis are very clearly just shirtless purely for the sake of being shirtless — even in scenarios and conditions which, quite frankly, would not lend themselves well to one having such few layers of clothing on their body, given the supposed location and time of year in which these scenes are taking place.

There are also a few times in which the characters are in completely compromising positions or situations for reasons which are completely inexplicable, other than that the film creators were obviously just trying to find any reason or opportunity under the sun for which to disrobe someone; for example, there is one particularly telling instance in scene 52, where Arthur arrives at a hotel in Brussels to reunite with Paul, and is guided to his room by a staff member who, upon knocking for him, is told to “come in” by Verlaine, yet when the door is opened, said older Parisian poet is standing almost right in front of the hotel room’s door, stark naked, pouring water over his head as if to take a bath — making absolutely zero efforts to cover himself for what very well could just have been the staff alone coming to talk to him about something.

The entire rest of the scene also takes place with the elder man making no efforts to even grab a towel after getting out of the bath, and then getting into a physical brawl to the point of wrestling in the buff with a fully clothed Rimbaud along the floor even in an entirely non-sexual context, because of course it does.

Perhaps it is absurd, from your point of view, to complain about these sorts of things in a film that places itself under such a category as “erotic” anything, and if that’s the case, then sure, that’s a completely fair way of looking at it; still, at least for me, pointless nudity and sex scenes that add nothing to the plot even from an emotional perspective — especially in a film that is supposed to be telling a real life tale about people who actually existed in this world — equals an automatic detraction of points from the movie in question, as a truly good film would not have to resort to such cheap tactics to keep a viewer interested and entertained.

I suppose some watchers might find it refreshing that it is actually the male characters who are primarily getting treated this way this time around, as it is typically the female ones to whom this is done in most cinema, but as for myself, I personally find it just as ridiculous, awkward, and unnecessary regardless — whether it calls itself an erotic drama or otherwise.

Overall Historical Accuracy

Alright, before we get into the very biggest issue with the movie’s script and all of the little historical inaccuracies that are connected to it, I first want to take the time to address just a few small ones scattered here and there throughout the film that are entirely disconnected from the main subject we’ll be talking about afterwards.

Unlike the more major problems we’re saving for a little bit later, most of these things I’m going to be mentioning don’t have any extreme plot-altering powers, in terms of the bigger picture that viewers are going to take away with them when the credits roll; they’re merely factual fallacies and omissions that, although minor in impact, I still thought were kind of unhelpful for anyone who might be tuning in to Total Eclipse with the hope of actually learning something.

You’d think with a movie so incredibly bold and confident about having its facts straight that it doesn’t even just claim to be “based on a true story” as most do, but actually outright states over text before the film opens that “what follows is [Verlaine and Rimbaud’s] story directly taken from their letters and poetry”, the actual contents of the film, then, would have to be something phenomenally well-researched and extremely close to the real events — even if a little bit of extra dramatization might be sprinkled here or there; that’s really not the case, though.

Despite the much braver and frankly somewhat lawsuit-inviting statement, the vast majority of even the most basic points about their lives and the time the two poets spent together are greatly misrepresented by the writers — let alone the finer and more intricate details of it all.

Even the facts surrounding Rimbaud’s death towards the end of the movie are…murky at best, in the way that they are presented there; I have already explained some of this — mostly in regards to the potential for audience confusion, thanks to an unusual decision to write in an injury to Arthur’s knee, in the exact same spot as the tumor that will later develop and take his life — in the “Writing and Script” section, but there is far more to it than just what was spoken of back then.

Yes, while we are admittedly told that Rimbaud developed ‘a tumor’ in his knee, that his leg was amputated, and that regardless of the operation, he became even sicker and eventually died, what the film fails to mention in any capacity is that this so-called ‘tumor’ was actually bone cancer (presumed osteosarcoma), and that the reason the amputation did not save his life is that neither he nor anyone else was even aware it was cancer until after the surgery was over; in the beginning, he had honestly assumed it to be nothing more than arthritis, and this is why he didn’t think to seek any help until it had become rather unlivable — then, once he did, he was misdiagnosed by two separate doctors before he was finally operated on under the assumption it was actually tubercular synovitis. By the time that any truth in the matter had actually come to light, the damage had already been done, and no amount of amputating or rest would have saved him.

I’ll make mention here, as well, that I’ve seen another person once bring forth a complaint that Arthur never had a point in which he returned home to the family farm in Roche between the amputation and his death, but I cannot personally find anything which definitively supports this claim within any of my own resources that I’ve acquired over the years; as far as I can see, the order of those events in particular as they are presented in the film actually seem quite accurate to reality, so take that information as you will. If you, yourself, wish to do further research to see if it is indeed the case, then feel free; either way, I thought it was at least worth a single note.

Another, topically similar head-scratcher for me which I cannot recall being factually supported in anything I’ve ever read thus far is this purported ‘tumor’ that Verlaine claims to have in his own knee in Total Eclipse, when he is told of how Arthur died; either I am just forgetting something and have not looked thoroughly enough into things (which I grant is entirely possible, seeing as that Paul is someone I have researched admittedly a tiny bit less than Rimbaud), or this is a completely made-up issue they added purely to mirror the last physical condition of his lover for some reason.

Some other befuddling omissions and inaccuracies include entirely failing to ever make even so much as a passing reference to the fact that Verlaine actually took up teaching professionally during the time that he and Arthur lived in London — choosing instead to have him sit around and bemoan the dwindling of their personal funds as he continues to rely solely upon the money he had claim to through his fractured marriage with Mathilde — and making Paul claim to Arthur that he converted to Catholicism after the divorce with his wife was finalized, rather than in prison as was genuinely the case (and which, perplexingly, was sort of previously established in an earlier line of dialogue to begin with).

I would also like to have seen Mathilde’s father express a bit more sweetness and protectiveness over his daughter, for, although his character is mostly serviceable enough in this movie for the part he holds, it was a well-known fact that Mathilde’s parents were both very loving, and especially that her dad was a good man who was greatly concerned with her personal happiness, wishes, and well-being, in a time where that was admittedly rather exceptional and extraordinarily uncommon on its own.

And while we’re speaking of parents, while, again, I don’t want to dive into another massive history lesson here, I would like to say that I don’t think Rimbaud’s mother is portrayed accurately here at all, compared to how she was said to be in real life — both by Arthur himself and by basically anyone who had ever even briefly met her; by all historical record, Marie Rimbaud was a cold, humorless, unsympathetic person whose husband (supposedly described to be her exact opposite) could not even stand to be in the home with her for more than a few days per year — if that — after their first few months of marriage, and permanently left her after six years, never to see her or their children again.

To her children — and especially Arthur, whom had an extra burden placed upon him when, as a young child, he had already been labeled a genius by his teachers — Marie was callous, cold, strict, controlling, and (especially physically) abusive, sometimes even forcing them to go for days without food as punishment if they did not perform well enough in school.

She did not, by any means, approve of Arthur’s career of choice and absolutely did not feel even as mildly sympathetic to him and his plights or feelings as this film seems to want you to believe; in fact, given that on his deathbed she actively chose to forcefully pull his sister away from visiting him at one point, and even went so far as to go against his final wishes for his burial, I hesitate to think that she would’ve cared to follow him out and watch him leave the family farm on his final days, either.

Anyone who had ever met her — including some of Arthur’s teachers and interviewers later on in her own life — tended to fear her and either considered her a terrifying, violent, or just plain unenjoyable individual, if not all of the above.

Now, I believe that just about covers all I have to say in relation to the smaller things, so, without further ado, let’s sit down and have a nice little chat about the real trouble with Total Eclipse and its very poorly written plot.

Considering how little I know them, I truly don’t want to assume the worst when it comes to Agnieszka Holland and Christopher Hampton’s intentions for the script — and, by extension, the film that was built upon it; nevertheless, there are some things in this film that it is just very hard to give them the full benefit of the doubt on, when they so boastfully proclaim that they have been perfectly faithful to the true story and that everything that happens in their adaptation of it is taken directly from Rimbaud and Verlaine’s poetry and letters, yet so much of it is either completely made-up nonsense with absolutely no basis or majorly re-arranges events in a way that it completely changes the narrative with which an uninformed audience is going to walk away.

(And granted, the original screenplay that this movie was made from was written in the late 1960s, so information then was likely not as widely available as it is today, and thus, it does leave a little bit more slack for any of Hampton’s personal failures at that time (although some are still very inexcusable basic facts that definitely would have been out there within reach), but the same cannot truly be said for the movie itself — as, even if some details perhaps still weren’t available in the same way that they are today, at least the vast majority were out there in some capacity, and they had more than enough money and means to hire actual historical experts to do research and seek the truth out for them.)

I can’t — and thus won’t, as I don’t want to place words in their mouths or make any unsavory assumptions on this matter that may be untrue — begin to guess what possessed the creators to make Verlaine the true protagonist and narrator of this story, but regardless of what their reasons may have been, I can say with the utmost confidence that it is almost certainly what caused all of the greatest downfalls of this film, plot and accuracy-wise.

You see, the big challenge that always comes with telling a story from one particular character’s point of view is two-fold: 1) that that character you chose is always going to be biased in the way they tell their tale and how they view other characters, and 2) that, at least typically speaking, once you make your character the narrator and the main protagonist, it becomes tempting to want to paint them in a better or more forgivable, sympathetic light so that the audience will be at least a little more likely to root for them.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a problem when it comes to fiction, because in fiction, the writer is free to present a story from whatever perspective they want and make their characters — however either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ they may actually be based on their actions — as likable as they desire, and that is perfectly fine, as at the end of the day it is no one but the author’s invented story to tell; however, when it is a story about real people and their actual lives, the situation becomes a bit hairier.

Not only is it very difficult to tell a factual story from a factual person’s point of view and represent their thoughts fairly and accurately, unless their feelings on the matter are exceedingly well documented, but it will also inevitably do some form of disservice to someone else involved in that tale every time.

There is a famous saying that there are two sides to every story, but I disagree; there are not just two sides to every story, but at least three — even if there are only two people involved; after all, there is the perspective of Person A, the perspective of Person B, and then also the perspective of anyone else who might be on the outside of the situation looking in — the person who probably has neither of the biases that the involved parties have, but whom, at the same time, might also be lacking in some key information that the other two both possess, depending on the circumstances.

Naturally, when telling a true story, the ultimate goal is usually to be able to present a little bit of all three — that is to say, to show things largely from the unbiased outside position, but also use the information we have been given of both sides’ thoughts and motivations, if available, as well, to establish and represent those feelings and ideas and do justice to them as much as we can.

Total Eclipse does not care about any of this, though; rather, it seems to be under the impression that simply because Verlaine was the longer-living of the two men and he did the one simple courtesy of preserving and publishing whatever poetry his late former paramour had left in his care, this means that it is acceptable to tell the story of their relationship entirely from his perspective and that no harm could possibly be done in doing so.

However, that is a logical fallacy, and a very harmful one, at that, to the actual victims of the real life happenings that went on during those years — especially if you intend to make Paul look at all like the ‘good guy’ within the dynamics of either of his relationships, or even only ‘equally as guilty’ as Rimbaud.

Of course, I won’t say that presenting Verlaine in such lights from his own point of view would be in any way an inaccurate depiction of his thoughts, because from everything we do know about him, this was his point of view; based on many of his actions and letters and other recorded bits of information, he did appear to have a massive victim complex in every situation that he himself had caused, constantly jumping back and forth from blaming either his wife or his extramarital partner for all of his bad behavior — often dependant on whomever he happened to be with and/or wanted to appease at the time — throughout the affair.

Even further supporting this already clear observation is Rimbaud’s famous The Infernal Spouse, from his work A Season in Hell, which, as stated before, is widely believed to be written from the perspective of Paul about Arthur himself; in it, the speaker (whom would be Paul) ultimately paints himself as the poor, helpless, ‘once-respectable’ victim of a demon who came to him in the guise of a youth (whom would be Arthur) and seduced him, making his life a living hell where the speaker has “no choice” but to continue down the terrible path of ruin.

If I didn’t know any better, I would almost assume that this movie was, for whatever reason, written not just to be told from the Parisian poet’s perspective, but specifically and solely through the lens of this one particular poem, if the narrative of said work was taken entirely at face value — yet, this is clearly not true, as even that piece (including some excerpts from it I discussed before, which were used within this very movie) leaves more room for charity towards Rimbaud and his overall portrayal than this film does.

Whereas The Infernal Spouse still speaks at times to his kindness, charity, grace, and goodness — among other not strictly negative human qualities present within him — in spite of itself, Total Eclipse’s version of Rimbaud is, as I’ve said in prior sections, a jaded, sadistic, rude and relatively heartless edgelord who may or may not be a complete sociopath, not to mention the ultimate source of all conflict in everyone’s lives.

Meanwhile, Verlaine is presented as, yes, a violent drunk who abuses his wife and child during his moments of insobriety, but one who is genuinely remorseful after every action and who, no matter how thoroughly unlikable his actions may make him at present for most of the film, is heavily implied to have only become a drunkard thanks to Rimbaud’s influence and presence in his life, and ever before that — and any time the teen was out of his life at all, for that matter — was a good, kind, and loving person who merely didn’t know how to exist without someone by his side and just couldn’t help falling in love with multiple people.

Oh, but those might seem rather broad-sweeping and loaded claims without getting into any details, so let’s go through the film bit by bit and talk about all the big and little changes and omissions that make it turn out that way, hm?

Aside from the dichotomy already mentioned twice earlier of the quoting of an excerpt from The Infernal Spouse in the opening scene — which speaks of some redeeming qualities in Rimbaud that we will never even truly get to see throughout this entire film — the first major mistake made within the script is the decision to include so much of the second scene so early on within the movie.

Now, of course, I’m not talking about from a narrative perspective; naturally, it does make sense that if one is telling a story from the point of view of Paul, then starting the movie out with a glimpse into the time after Rimbaud’s death when he meets with the young poet’s sister not only is a great way to attempt to generate intrigue right away, but also provides an excellent way to transition back into the past by having Verlaine begin to reminisce on the things they had once done together, but in regards to trying to present an unbiased story that will allow the audience to form their own conclusions at the end based on actual facts, I do feel it is a little bit manipulative — whether intentionally so or not.

After all, if from the moment we are first introduced to this older Parisian poet, we instantly see him establish himself as this selfless hero of a man who helped Rimbaud along in his ambitions as a poet even to the complete detriment of his own once-greater notoriety and career, it will from that moment forward already be seeded in our minds that we are intended to see him as such and remember it above all else, despite any of what we might see in the scenes that will follow; it makes it much harder to be unbiased towards him when the film is immediately waving it in our collective faces how much he sacrificed and suffered for the man that now isn’t even around to enjoy his own success.

Skipping past all the pre-established discussion surrounding the writers’ decision to add in all of the unfounded, extremely awkward, and cringeworthy animal imitating and how that is a poor portrayal of Rimbaud’s genius, we next arrive at the dinner scene between Arthur, Paul, Mathilde, and her mother.

There are quite a few strange and, as far as I could tell, unbacked claims that are made here — not least of all the statement from the teenage poet himself that his mother was “quite happy” that he had joined Verlaine in Paris to do writing work with him, when as far as we are aware, she was actually quite opposed to her son’s job of choice; I suppose the intended implication, then, was that she was just happy to get rid of him in any way she could so long as she didn’t have to pay for it, because he was nothing but trouble — and while that may not necessarily be inaccurate to her actual personality or thoughts towards Arthur in real life, regardless of whether it is or isn’t, it is still a bit confusing within the context of the movie, as this attitude is not really well expressed in any scene where she appears.

On the flip side, when the boy’s father is mentioned, he dryly makes a response saying that his father’s primary occupation is drinking and that they (the Rimbaud family) haven’t seen him in ten years; the latter part of this is absolutely true, as Captain Frederic Rimbaud left after the last of the children was born, and it does somewhat make sense to show Rimbaud having a relative disinterest in getting back in touch with him given that we know neither the children nor the father himself ever seemed to care much about reconnecting, but the claim about him being a drunkard is, to my knowledge, mostly unfounded, and I find it particularly unusual that they go so far out of their way to include this comment and have Arthur show a cold disdain and strong sense of negativity behind his words when talking about drinking — as though it were a bad thing in his eyes — when he is henceforth after this scene portrayed as someone who himself enjoys drinking and is not only happy to start a relationship with a man whom, after meeting him, remains almost perpetually drunk, but even later tries to talk said man out of quitting.

And lastly, the claims that Arthur lied about his age to Paul in his letters by saying that he was 21 is, to my knowledge, completely speculative and entirely invented by this film; granted, given that the vast majority of all correspondence between Paul and Arthur prior to their first meeting — save for one or two paraphrased lines of one letter that Verlaine claims to remember existing — was lost forever to history, there’s nothing to say that it didn’t happen, but there’s also no real reason that I know of to believe that it did.

So, why, then, was the decision made to add this line? Well, I think it may have been for the sake of audience comfort, in a way — just as was the choice to reinforce that Mathilde was 18 (stated in scene 14) when Arthur arrived at their home, and the creative decision to have Rimbaud be the one to make the first physical move on Paul (shown in scene 21) when in reality that sort of thing is completely undocumented and therefore anything shown of it will always be speculative; if we’re assured that Verlaine is married to an eighteen-year-old woman and it’s never stated when they married, if he thinks Arthur is an adult man when he invites him into his home, and if even after knowing better, Rimbaud — the sixteen-year-old — is at least the first one to make a physical move on the adult, well, it’s probably a little bit less creepy in the eyes of the audience, right? Especially if their ages are really only brought up once or twice — or, in the case of Verlaine, not at all (he was 27 historically when Arthur came to live with him) — and then never mentioned again for the rest of the two-hour film.

I know that there will be people who will likely want to use the “it was a different time” argument here to push away the disturbing factor in all of this, but not only do I believe that this argument is absurd — as if you truly believe something is wrong according to your personal moral compass, that should not change based solely upon what may or may not have been considered “acceptable” at the time — the simple fact of the matter is that things weren’t as ‘different’ back then as you might think, anyway; the age of majority was actually much higher back in the late nineteenth century (hence even Total Eclipse itself having Paul call Mathilde, his wife, “still just a child” and Arthur reply “so am I” in scene six), and most people did not marry until both parties were fairly late into, or at best halfway through, their 20s.

Any way you want to slice it, Paul Verlaine’s only dating history throughout his adult life (a 16 year old girl at 25, a 16 year old boy at 27, and purportedly a 17 year old boy at 32) was disturbing according to most people’s moral compasses, even from the perspective of someone from back then. It is a matter of historical record that when the poet’s mother started pushing in fear for her own life and desperation to have him gone (more on this later) for the at-the-time 24-year-old Paul to find someone to marry and her first suggestion happened to be that of a 14-year-old Mathilde, the courtship that eventually ensued when Mathilde was 16 and the proposal for marriage 8 days later heavily concerned the girl’s father, and he did all that he could to prevent it, as she was much too young for such a thing; it was only because Verlaine was friends with the girl’s brother that he eventually managed to worm his way into the rest of the family’s confidence and approval, and perpetually forced the father’s hand through continuous pressure from them and Verlaine’s mother that he eventually caved and gave consent to both a relationship and then later a marriage under the belief that this was what his daughter wanted, who she loved, and who would make her happiest — which, based on Verlaine’s wishes, would have occurred fairly soon after had several events not taken place to postpone it.

As for Verlaine, just as I stated earlier, there are very few times when he is shown to have been cruel to anyone outside of a very clearly drunken state — and in those two moments that he is, it is still rather ambiguous whether or not he has perhaps had a little bit to drink beforehand; we can, of course, assume that he has not by the very coherent way that he is speaking and his much steadier and more refined mannerisms, but at least as far as scene 10 goes — in which, after Mathilde suggests possibly finding somewhere else for Rimbaud to stay, her now rather angry husband goes on a rant about unfairness and how if it wasn’t for the war and everything he’d been through because of it, they wouldn’t even be living in her parents house to begin with, then throws a book across a room — the situation is made a little hazy by the fact that we saw the two poets drinking in a bar not too many scenes prior. Without anything to indicate whether or not these scenes take place during the same day, I find it rather impossible to say for certain.

Regarding the other scene, well…we’ll talk about it when we get there, but I do find it ironic that despite him having been historically recorded as drunk at that time, it is the only one in the film besides scene 10 where he is probably written not to be.

Immediately after scene 10, we once more jump back into the absolute absurdity of his teenage affair partner’s portrayal; instead of being honest that Arthur had only ever been brought into the home on a temporary stay while Mathilde’s father was out on a hunting trip and that by this point in the genuine reality, at least by all accounts of anything that I could find, he had already been moved out of the house and into a small apartment paid for by Paul and their other literary friends, Total Eclipse chooses to make it so that Mathilde’s father comes home in the middle of the boy’s stay without warning and there is a confrontation in which Rimbaud is quite rude to the man, until he is unceremoniously thrown out of the house — at which point Verlaine chases after him in the rain and hurriedly finds him a place to stay.

Of course, I am not saying the youth was actually a perfect house guest, or that he didn’t cause any amount of trouble ever or garner some form of disdain from his hosts in the house de Fleurville — far from it; certainly, Mathilde and her mother took a strong disliking to Arthur which only grew the longer he stayed there — not just because they deemed him unrefined and more trouble than they cared to handle, but also out of jealousy of the fact that Verlaine would spend almost all day every day at his side out in the city — and thus, hoping to be rid of him and make Paul dedicate less time to him, they arranged for Mr. Theodore Maute de Fleurville to come home sooner, so that Paul would feel obligated to put him up elsewhere before he arrived.

The point I am trying to make, though, is that things did not happen in the way, order, or even entirely for the exact reasons that this movie presents it — for, by all known sources that I could uncover, Arthur was never meant to stay there permanently, he stayed a bit longer than was properly communicated through the scenes we were shown and a lot happened that was not discussed regarding him and his now-mentor (some of which we will be talking about later), it was absolutely not by random chance or without warning that Mathilde’s father arrived home, and Rimbaud and Mr. Maute de Fleurville never even really met at all.

Scene 16 itself is actually fairly true to historical fact, minus the exchanging of Mathilde’s then actually-visiting brother for her parents as the ones who noticed the ruckus upstairs and came to her rescue during the abuse, but it is missing a lot of context and clues as to the passage of time due to the rushing of — and changes made to — the main plot.

In reality, this fight had occurred quite a while after Arthur had been moved to his new apartment, and while she had never looked kindly or understandingly upon the teen’s poverty, the harsh comment she made which sent Verlaine over the edge was likely more fueled by resentment and jealousy than anything else — as, despite her expectation and hope that removing the boy from the household would lead to her husband spending less time with him and more time with her, it had actually just backfired into the older man deciding that he would rather start spending nights over with him and often not even come home at all for days or weeks at a time.

In regards to what the argument was about, they also fail to leave in the context that although Rimbaud did feel the need to steal books back in his hometown in order to be able to read them because he could not afford differently, he also did try as a general rule to return them after he was done, and it was only if he felt there was no way to do so without getting caught in certain situations that he would choose to sell them instead for money — thereby making him look infinitely worse than he actually was in this situation.

They also have Arthur explain to Paul in Scene 17 that after a somewhat dubious but not altogether unlikely life event, he had “decided to be a genius”, but this is something of a misquoting, as the actual letter to a friend that they are referencing through this scene did not say he desired to be a ‘genius’ — which he had already been dubbed for better or worse since childhood by his teachers, as we will discuss later — but rather, a ‘seer’.

Some might say that these two words could be more or less synonymous with each other, but I disagree; being a visionary is not necessarily the same as being a genius or vice versa, and furthermore, Rimbaud himself has described in his own words what he believes it means to be a true ‘genius’ (essentially being able to recover a child-like sense of wonder and heart at will), and it does not match up at all with the context of any of what this movie purports — nor even with the standard definition of those who had given it to him in the first place, so using it here just feels strange and deeply out of place within his actual philosophy, and seemingly only exists to sound overly conceited.

Scene 19 is just…completely off the rails with its insanity.

Yes, I will grant that Rimbaud did eventually drunkenly injure someone from Verlaine’s literary circle with a sword-cane, and that will be something I will discuss when the time actually comes, but that event that is, for some reason, shown here did not happen until many months into his stay in Paris, and it most certainly did not happen in the same absurdist, heavily over-dramatized fashion in which it was presented here — nor did he ever unzip and take a piss on Theodore de Banville(?), from atop a table, or anyone anywhere for that matter.

Something I desperately need everyone to understand and which Total Eclipse did Rimbaud a huge disservice in never showing is that, despite what this scene’s dishonest placement on the timeline would imply, and like I had alluded to previously, the aforementioned writer group was, for the longest time and especially still at the juncture in question, actually fairly fond of him on the whole, and that was why they had worked with Paul when Mathilde’s father was returning home to find Arthur a place to live there in Paris.

Outside of the obvious growing resentment from Mathilde and her mother, the time during which this scene is incorrectly claimed to have taken place was genuinely a time of relative peace and happiness — at least, as far as Rimbaud’s happiness, reputation, and overall well-being was concerned; every day, Verlaine was helping him move up in the literary world, writing poems with him, and proudly walking around Paris with the boy lovingly clinging on his arm, taking him to theatres and showing him all sorts of grand places that the city had to offer, even as their obviously romantic and sexual relationship became a thing that started to be mockingly reported about in the papers.

Because, at the time, he was — to the best of anyone’s knowledge — still saving all of his rage and abuse for his young wife, he and his paramour were thus able to enjoy this sort of honeymoon phase whilst his infatuation with Arthur was still pretty new.

Now, scene 21’s creative liberties aside, realistically speaking, we honestly don’t know when or how their relationship there turned physical; like I’ve said, any attempt to nail down a specific time for that would really just be engaging in rampant speculation, but for the sake of determining historical accuracy, I think it’s pretty fair to say that it’s probably more realistic if one assumes it was roughly around the time that the boy moved into his own apartment, given that was when Verlaine actively started staying the night with him instead of with his spouse. Thus, no, I really don’t think the timing here is anywhere close to accurate.

Scene 22 is…something that also needs addressing.

Please don’t get me wrong here; it is 100% a historical fact that while Arthur may have been overall very emotionally well-off during this time period in his affair, Mathilde, on the other hand, suffered greatly at the hands of her husband. During this very painful stretch of her marriage to Verlaine, she was often forced to endure a never-ending back and forth of being neglected some days and then emotionally, physically, and yes, most presumably sexually abused the others; it was a living hell for her, and I am certainly in no way attempting to take away from that or make excuses for her abuser.

That being said, the day that their son, Georges Verlaine, was born into the world, this was absolutely not the case — and although I appreciate their willingness to so explicitly show the dark side of their relationship, lying about this one time when things actually seemed to be improving, even if ever so briefly, really only serves to prevent the audience from being able to understand why it is that she remained so devoted to him for so long, caught up in this shitty situation.

Exactly as I said back in the “Writing & Script” subsection of “The Good”, the vast majority of abusive relationships — the one between Mathilde and Paul absolutely included — do not exist entirely devoid of ‘good’ or ‘happy’ moments; as a matter of fact, a good deal of them actually start out as quite wonderful and unsuspecting, but this is just precisely what can make them all the more dangerous — as once the honeymoon phase wears off (and/or the abuser realizes they have their significant other hooked and can relax) and things take a darker turn, these good moments that existed in the past and sometimes still might happen now and again in the present can often keep the victim from leaving, trapped by the vague hope that if they only give their abuser enough chances for improvement, things will be happy once more.

I will not be discussing the ins and outs of their situation in detail for a little while yet (though we will get to that eventually), but trust me when I say that there was no doubt Mathilde’s situation was exactly this sort of problem.

Because Paul reacted well to the birth of their child when he returned home late that one particular night, acting joyful and proud and kissing his wife and son, Mathilde’s heart was set enough at ease that she started thinking things would improve and he would naturally want to be around more to spend time with the family he had created; she was, of course, wrong in her belief, for the sweetness died not too long after this brief respite, and the cycle of absence and abuse, followed by tearful apologies, became the normal thing for their daily lives once more.

As a matter of fact, things escalated even from what they already were before — so much so that it reached a point where he would begin to threaten his wife and son’s lives on several occasions, attempting to kill them in various ways and repeatedly having to be dragged out or stopped by the threat of violence from other people in their lives.

…And yet, despite all of this being entirely true, he was nevertheless forgiven by her almost every single time, even after multiple transgressions. Why? Well, exactly because there were those few good moments she remembered sharing not even so long ago, and because each and every time he hurt her, he would literally get down on his hands and knees and cry, blaming it all on his drinking and begging for forgiveness in such sad and pathetic ways that she — so desperately clinging onto the happiness she believed they’d had before and wanting to believe that what he said was true — could not help being moved to pardon him and give him “just one more chance”.

The above outlook being her historically documented attitude and thought process throughout it all is why it is so crucial to establish that there were some rare good moments between him and Mathilde, even in the midst of all the horrible treatment she endured, as it presents her own personal experiences as a victim of abuse fairly and accurately and allows others who perhaps have not gone through such things to more easily relate and understand why she — and for that matter, so many other victims like her throughout the world — often ends up caught in this terrible, seemingly unending cycle of mistreatment; to fail to present this in any better way than “he suddenly started beating her and was never, ever kind to her at all anymore for months or years, but she still stayed because…reasons” even when all of the information is right there in front of you, is to do a deep injustice to all victims of abuse of any era who may have a similar story to Mathilde — not simply her alone.

As I have said before, when it comes to situations like this, it is almost never anywhere near that black and white.

And speaking of times in which this movie attempts to oversimplify very complex matters and issues with no concern for the consequences, what this next scene and a ridiculously good many after it attempt to set up is yet another perfect example of that.

Total Eclipse would like you to believe that immediately after the baby is born and Verlaine allegedly mistreats his wife yet again on that very same night, Rimbaud is quickly sent back home to Charleville to return to his family due to Mathilde “making trouble” over the poets spending too much time together; it then appears to proclaim to us that some time later, after being terribly bored with life on the farm, Arthur just up and decides seemingly out of nowhere to return to Paris, and it is only after this self-re-insertion of the teenager into his mentor’s life that Paul becomes abusive to his spouse once more.

Unfortunately, absolutely none of this is the truth, and before I can explain to you just how much injustice this narrative does to the people involved in it, I need to first explain to you what actually happened.

In reality, as I might have alluded to prior when talking of the suffering Mathilde and her child endured continuously after that brief respite of the day of Georges’ birth, it was actually a few months before things finally came to a head between the couple, and even then it was only truly because Verlaine’s actions on that day became so traumatizingly extreme — ripping his son from Mathilde’s arms and throwing him against the wall, and then proceeding to pin his wife to the floor and strangle her until her father found them and intervened — that she could no longer bear to hide it from her family anymore out of fear for herself and, above all, her little one.

After this, the couple ended up splitting for a little while — with Paul already having hurried off to his own mother’s house to seek refuge from his own actions for a time, and Mathilde leaving with her father and child for Périgueux for six weeks of rest, under her doctor’s orders.

From day two onward, the drunkard poet would, of course, make several attempts to reach out to his estranged wife and try to make amends, but to little to no avail, as, even after he managed to convince her mother to forward his letters to her, he was still forbidden any knowledge of her current location and although Mathilde did admit to still loving him, her one condition for taking him back was that he first had to get rid of Rimbaud — whom, seeking someone other than her husband to blame, she blindly pinned all of her suffering and Verlaine’s horrible actions on.

And you might think, “Okay, but this has to be the point when Arthur actually gets sent home, right? That’s not really that big of an omission, is it?” But no, you’d be wrong about that, too — immensely wrong, on both accounts.

See, Paul thought that if he refused and waited it out long enough, Mathilde would just have to come around about the whole thing and forget about her ultimatums in favor of being with him again.

In the meantime, he had Rimbaud to still focus all of his attention on — both positive, and now also likely negative, given that not only did Verlaine just no longer have anyone else to store up and take out his cruelty and abuse on, but it was also only after this point in time that there was a noticeable and historically documented decline in his teenage affair partner’s general physical and mental health.

Suddenly gone was that honeymoon period I had spoken of before, where life was nothing but sunshine and roses and rainbows for the relationship between the two poets and the rapport they shared with their writing circle, as Rimbaud would soon begin to show up drunk and in disarray among their mutual author and poet friends more and more, and — although he had always been less refined in his behavior and fairly brash and frank about his disagreements on things — started to act out more amongst them, as well. In the end, this unexpected descent of Arthur’s into someone they could no longer bring themselves to respect as they once had, coupled with Paul’s increasingly brazen behavior surrounding their relationship, began to drive a wedge between them and the rest of the group, which reached its final straw when Arthur, thoroughly wasted and frustrated over (if I remember correctly) a debate about poetry and morality, got into a fight one night with another man, injuring him with his sword-cane and ensuring the total downfall of his reputation.

It was in response to both this particular event causing potential disgrace for Paul and pressure from Mathilde’s father — who was now contacting a lawyer and threatening his son-in-law with separation of property and a full investigation into his abusive behavior if he did not comply — that the older poet finally decided all that time later to send Arthur home and supposedly try to make amends with his wife.

And yes, Mathilde did (regrettably) take him back after Arthur was gone, and yes, he did genuinely make an effort to be better and live a stable life working a stable job — but only for all of a few days, and then he immediately went right back to drinking and abusing and kidnapping and threatening death upon his wife and child many times over, until he eventually just disappeared one day without a trace, unable to be found, and went off to Brussels, where he wrote to Arthur to essentially tell him that he was done with his wife and that they could run away together, and sent for him to join him — and join him the boy did.

…So, now that we’ve been over what really occurred in the space of time supposedly covered by scenes 22 through 32, let’s talk about all of the reasons why Total Eclipse’s interpretation of those events is a major problem (besides the obvious aforementioned portrayal of Mathilde’s personal motivations and reasonings for staying with Paul).

Starting off with the small stuff, and definitely on a more positive note, I don’t really have a lot of bad things to say about scenes 23 and 24, where we see Arthur return back home to the farm and spend time amongst his family; the most major complaint I have about this section is that the youth’s mother seems, although somewhat strict, noticeably more pleasant and lenient than how she was described to be in real life, and far more willing to take Arthur’s side and be understanding in her own way when the teen explains why he was forced to come home, but this topic is something I will go into greater detail about much later down the line, as it is something of a repeating theme within this movie.

Other than that, circling back to that aforementioned discussion between the boy and his mother, the script has him state that Mathilde was the one who was making trouble and threatening consequences if he was not sent away, but this is not exactly true, for although the poor woman did state that condition to her reunion with Paul in her desperation to hopefully fix her tragic marriage, it was actually her father who escalated things into any sort of serious threat; this change doesn’t really have that big of an impact on anything, admittedly, but it does knock a minor point off for historical accuracy.

The montage in scenes 30 and 31, where the two are traveling together, obviously did not happen at all — or at least, definitely not in the way that they were presented — given that there actually was no time prior to Brussels in which they had reunited, but as I will get around to talking about later, it does sort of serve to fill a space of happiness and relative stability that did occur after that reunion and before the time that Paul sneaks off to see Mathilde again, so it’s not really anything directly in the contents of that set of scenes that is a problem, but rather, what the narrative that they had met prior to Brussels implies as a whole.

…Which brings us to the major (and final) elephant in the room about all of these changes to, and rearrangements of, events for this section of the movie: the constant, continued push — even against all logic and proven, historically documented reality — towards the aforementioned idea that Verlaine was a relatively good man prior to Rimbaud’s arrival at their home, and that it was only while said teenager was present in his life that he ever showed any signs of abusive tendencies or other negative behavior.

Now, you can chalk nearly everything else up to lazy writing, poor fact-checking, blind negligence and lack of information all you want, but you cannot possibly convince me that there is not at least a little bit of deliberate deception in the fact that the event which was originally the actual temporary breaking point for Verlaine and his wife, ended up being removed from its rightful place before Rimbaud’s departure for the farm and instead adapted in its own right into scene 22 — just after Arthur’s supposed return.

You cannot convince me that it is a mere coincidence and accident that in this same breath, the script manages not only to somewhat tone-down the abuse that Paul dishes out to his family — at least in regards to the fact that, in real life, Paul threw the actual baby against the wall and not just shoved the bed that Georges was for some reason shown to be sleeping in — but also makes Mathilde react to this event by saying, “[Rimbaud]’s back, isn’t he?”, after Paul apologizes and breaks down, as if until this point everything had been peaceful and there was no other possible explanation for her husband to be acting this way.

Likewise, it is surely no mere mishap that the movie completely fails to mention that it was the older poet who sent for his young illicit partner to rejoin him and not just some whim of a bored Arthur, nor can it be easily seen as just a mistake that it insists that there was ever a point where the two poets were still in Paris and Verlaine was still with his wife after his and Arthur’s reunion at all, despite that no such thing ever genuinely happened to begin with; literally the only purpose that any of this serves within the film is simply to perpetuate this myth of Rimbaud being this absolute demon’s spawn who, although brilliant in his ideas, was the source of everyone’s problems and misery. In scene 27, they even go so sickeningly far as to portray Rimbaud — who, in many of his real life writings, actually sympathized and empathized greatly with battered, oppressed, and controlled women — as someone who laughed uncontrollably with amusement when Verlaine made jokes about his actual, horribly violent acts of abuse towards his wife.

Even if you really want to somehow give them the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe they are just doing this for the sake of creating added melodrama and shock value and didn’t realize at all the picture that it was painting, it doesn’t change the fact that this narrative which is supposedly about real, living, breathing people who existed in the world once is made horribly untruthful and demonizing as a result, and thereby spreads way too much misinformation to anyone who doesn’t know any better but to take it at face value.

No matter how much Total Eclipse purports otherwise, Rimbaud was not the reason why Paul became the way he did — not him being a drunkard, not him being indecisive, and not him being abusive, or even homicidal; he was already all of that long before they ever met. Without delving too much into giving out another long history lesson, what you need to understand is that Paul had had a drinking problem before he even met Mathilde, and despite both of his parents being frankly very good people as far as we are able to know, he disliked his mother and had even tried to murder her on several occasions; yes, he temporarily put up a facade for the sake of wooing Mathilde and avoided drinking for a brief period in their marriage as well, but he had already broken character and begun to verbally and physically abuse her before Arthur was ever involved in their lives. Mathilde blaming the boy for their troubles (which she genuinely did and continued to claim even long after their marriage was over) was simply her way of coping with the terrible situation she had found herself in and giving herself a way to believe that the person she thought she had known during those good times was real and could be made to come back if someone else was only removed from his life. Paul played into this fairytale because it benefited him to do so when he was trying to get back into her good graces, just as he would play into Mathilde being the source of their grief when he was trying to earn Arthur’s favor.

Though unfortunate, Mathilde, for her part, cannot be totally blamed for trying to cope with her trauma in this way, but Paul absolutely can be blamed for using it as a scapegoat for his problems — and so can Total Eclipse for taking that false scenario and going to such absurd lengths to make it seem as though it was true. I wish I could say that this was the last time that the movie did something like this, but…well, we’ll get to that when we get to it; for now, let’s step away from this topic for awhile and move on to the next scene.

To be honest, aside from one minor thing I’ve already said in a previous section, I wouldn’t really say that there is anything wrong with scene 32 or 33 in any way. It is a fact that at some point after their reunion, while they were still in Brussels, Paul did arrange behind Arthur’s back for his wife to meet him at a hotel, and he did sneak out to see her as is depicted; I just wish once more that they had been honest about the timeline of things prior to this moment, and that it was made clear that for at least a short while after the two writers re-connected, things were actually very peaceful and happy again between them — to the point where Paul was (probably unadvisedly) openly waving his relationship with Rimbaud in front of the faces of Belgium authorities for fun, and as far as we know there had been no indication of any fights between the two, which makes him turning back to Mathilde an even better example of just how undecided and unpromptedly unfaithful of a person he was to both of his lovers. Scenes 30 and 31, as I said, do sort of fill that quota of peaceful times I suppose, but…not exactly in an honest way.

As for the next part, where Paul reunites with Mathilde and makes love with her before promising to leave with her for New Caledonia and abandon Arthur, there’s not a whole lot of negative things for me to criticize about it, as it’s pretty accurate to reality, overall, other than one small nitpick about the fact they have Paul deny that his paramour had ever been involved with the Commune, but I understand that at the time the movie was made, this was a much bigger point of contention than it is nowadays with the surfacing of new proof and information, so I can’t really hold the writers at fault for this.

What I can hold them at fault for, though, is the very unusual decision in the next scene to not only have Arthur run into Mathilde as she is leaving the hotel — which never happened, as she was long gone from the area before he arrived looking for Paul — but also to taunt her and then attempt to kiss her out of nowhere, against her will, despite the fact that a) Rimbaud had never shown any signs of being attracted to her and most importantly, b) this behavior would once again go against everything we know about how he genuinely viewed women and the way that they should be treated (with absolute freedom and respect, equal to that of any man).

Here, again, we also see yet another repeat of the insinuation that he is entirely at fault for everything that has happened, as Mathilde asks him bluntly, “Why are you doing this to us?”, making it clear to the audience even further that we should feel that both she and Paul are equally victims in this scenario, rather than that her abusive, cheating husband is ultimately the one to blame for being a two-timing asshole who can’t decide which person he wants to sleep with and treat like shit more. Granted, as has been established prior, this isn’t necessarily inaccurate to how the poor woman viewed matters, but with the movie never distinguishing her thoughts from the reality of the situation, this line really does not do anyone’s portrayal other than hers any legitimate favors.

Other than these few glaring issues, the rest of the scene is fairly accurate to how things went down in real life; I especially appreciated the partial, sarcastic reading aloud from Arthur of one of the genuine letters from Paul to Mathilde during this point in time, and the argument had between them following this was, on the whole, quite well-characterized and raw in emotion.

There is one particular bit of dialogue — where Paul asks, “You don’t care about my happiness, do you?” and Arthur answers “No, and neither should you” — I will say, that I can’t exactly make heads or tails of if they’re trying to portray the teen as heartless and manipulative, or just genuinely fed up and trying to insinuate that Paul should start thinking of others more than himself for once in his life, but given that I’m trying to be as generous as possible in my interpretations of these scenes whenever I can, we will just go under the assumption that it is the latter.

Ah, but then we reach the scene where Verlaine is leaving with his wife on the train; you know, this movie sometimes makes it very hard for me to be generous towards their intentions with things, and this is yet another one of those times, because…look, Arthur Rimbaud did not follow them to the next train station and then convince Paul to join him and go back; he wasn’t even there. Yes, Verlaine did ditch his spouse and her mother at the last minute as they were switching trains, but that was entirely his own decision, and as a matter of fact, based on the letters he sent to Mathilde shortly thereafter, insulting and berating her for trying to ‘trick’ him into leaving ‘his friend’, he wasn’t even certain that Rimbaud would take him back at the time — he just intended to try, so no, the younger poet had absolutely no part in that decision, much less was present at the station and mocked his partner’s wife from the other train as they left like how the film attempts to portray it. The entire thing is utter nonsense and a complete and total exaggeration of reality.

Moving on all the way to scenes 42 through 47, which supposedly depicts a good deal of their time living in London, the very first thing that I would like to address is this…insanely ‘creative’ liberty that was taken when they decided to create whatever absurd, borderline supernatural sub-plot they had going on to seemingly ‘explain’ Rimbaud losing his ability to write.

I don’t know who exactly on the writing team decided that it was an excellent idea to have him start dreaming of the moments in Africa not too long preceding his death, and to have these visions and senses of déjà vu when he sees what is presumably a boat to Africa consume him and his entire being to the point where his creativity nearly completely dies, but as I have said in a previous section, there is, to my knowledge, absolutely no basis to this, and it really only serves to take away from the importance of the things that were actually going on in his life at this point in time.

Indeed, things between the two lovers in general — and especially for Arthur — did eventually take a turn for the worse, but it was not because of some hallucinations of a future event plaguing the younger writer’s mind and destroying his sanity; it was actually due to far more ‘ordinary’ and sadly very predictable reasons.

As I think pretty much anyone could guess by now based on Verlaine’s previously set and established pattern of behavior whenever he has to be even remotely committed to one of his partners for any length of time, the older poet didn’t really take all that long after they settled in London to start trying to reach out to and make amends with his wife again, attempting all sorts of approaches in winning her back — including some utterly absurd ones like offering to share Arthur with her. And, it was in failing to receive a response from her time and time again that he became increasingly more frustrated, angry, restless, and reliant on drinking to comfort himself, leading to the same old cycle of violent outbursts, tearful apologies and pleading for forgiveness, and even threats of desertion or suicide aimed towards his current partner.

Just as with the time when he had been temporarily estranged from Mathilde due to his abuse and had only Rimbaud at his side to focus all of his moods on, this constant strain of fights and overall tension between the two men and obvious discontent on Paul’s part with not being able to reconnect with his spouse resulted in that same visible decline in the boy’s behavior and mood all over again, and unsurprisingly it became almost a perfect repeat of the past: friends, acquaintances, and colleagues who were once respectful of the two distanced themselves from them, and rumors flew about their unsubtle connection, leading only to further isolation and stigma — and when the going got rough, well…I think you can take a guess what happened: after a particularly brief quarrel one day, Verlaine essentially decided he’d had enough of the problem he’d gotten himself into and then jumped ship in the hope that he would be able to come crawling to Mathilde and ply her into taking him back with tears and threats of suicide if she didn’t.

But…let’s not get ahead of ourselves talking about the abandonment of Rimbaud in London and the accuracy of that matter just yet; we still need to finish addressing the topic that we’re already on.

See, the truth is, there are actually a few brief moments and lines of dialogue in this movie where we genuinely come close to almost addressing any of the above as having happened and been the cause of the deterioration of their relationship and life together, but the point I had been trying to make before is that pretty much every time this truly starts to seem like it is being set up and established even in some small minuscule way, it gets slapped away with some manner of absurd swerve into either a complete denial or omission of the facts, or this weird and unnecessary subplot about precognition.

The fact that Paul was repeatedly trying to reconnect with Mathilde on a romantic level, even while things really weren’t going all that terribly or unhappily for them in London, is never truly established; it is almost hinted at in Scene 42 by having the older poet seem unhappy about the possibility of a separation, and his willingness to submit both himself and his affair partner for a damning medical examination that could land them both in jail and the indifference he shows towards his partner’s fears and feelings about that does speak to an extent about his own selfishness and indecision in what he wants, but this subject is quickly dropped and swept to the side by the younger of the two suddenly spotting the ship which assumedly leads to Africa — at which the story shifts its narrative to focus on the apparent effects of that.

When the perfect opportunity comes up to address that they had actually been living a fairly steady — even if poor — life in London for some time before things went to shit and that Paul had been working a teaching job of his own to support them both, they instead heavily imply that all they were living off of was I guess previous funds from while he was with his wife, and this was the only apparent reason why he had been trying to reconnect with her or her family, which is greatly untrue and horribly misleading, at best.

And likewise, while we are given the constant impression that there is conflict and unrest between the two poets and their relationship, and there is one single, verbal line about Verlaine supposedly still being a drunkard, we are not ever shown any visual or verbal evidence of his drunkenness from the man himself — much less receive any display of the actual, sincerely violent altercations that occurred as a result of it; rather, we are simply shown one very clearly playful and obviously unserious little slapping fight in scene 40, which is quite obviously supposed to be viewed as ‘cute’ or ‘touching’ within its proper context, and then just the one serious argument in scene 48 that plays out just before Paul leaves to go back to his spouse.

There is a singular moment in scene 45 where Total Eclipse nearly appears to attempt an addressing of the underlying issues between the more seasoned author and his partner, by having the older man ask, “I don’t know what — what is it? You seem different.”, but instead of using this opportunity to do so and go into the actually most logical and truthful reason why his lover might have a more exasperated and less enabling attitude of his entitled and indecisive behavior (especially given that there is already a scene in this where Paul expressed that he was willing to send Rimbaud to jail for his own selfish desires), as has been said before, the script instead returns to its strange sub-plot and has Arthur respond that it’s the writing that’s changed him. No, not the exhausting back and forth of this on-again-off-again relationship with an indecisive man who can’t decide what he wants in life, not the constant emotional, physical, and mental turmoil — just the writing; that’s definitely all that’s wrong here.

Strangely, though, this almost seems to be contradicted by the later fight scene, as the greater frustration expressed by the youth there revolves primarily not around the writer’s block he is experiencing, but with the fact that he feels Verlaine is only still there with him because his wife won’t take him back and he doesn’t want to be alone, whereas Rimbaud himself is there because he genuinely wants to be. Really, with all of the contradictions and half-baked sub-plots, I don’t think this movie knows what it wants the motivations of its main characters to be, sometimes.

Even when it comes to the semi-final little quarrel between them — the one that was the apparent breaking point to make Paul decide to suddenly leave the country without his protégé and try to return to Mathilde — despite extremely evidently loving and looking for any and all possible excuses to add drama and shock value everywhere else but this section of the film, the writers for some reason decide not to address the fact that the older man made it a point to indulge himself in one final, direct slap to Arthur’s face with a fish he had just bought at the market.

I do find it incredibly odd just how devoid of any remotely violent, extreme, shocking, or even just plain absurd (beyond that one strange future-vision sub-plot) content that entire section of the movie is; it is almost as if the movie is just now intentionally going out of its way to avoid showing anything of the sort, but only in this one specific section, and although I can theorize some semi-logical reasons why this might be the case, I really can’t say for certain what their angle is here. It’s just…bizarre.

Moving onwards to scenes 52 through 54, we finally reach the…well, what I assume should be the climax of this film, considering it supposedly depicts the last days of their relationship and the famous moment when Verlaine fires his pistol on Rimbaud, but I’m not quite sure that’s how the script itself views the event — given that there’s still somehow roughly thirty minutes left in the movie by the time this happens.

Either way, there’s a lot that could be said about historical inaccuracies here — such as the fact that, despite showing the two fighting almost immediately upon their reunion in Brussels in scene 52, the true reason why things remained so tumultuous between them for those last few days they were together is never shared, and even outright lied about; it wasn’t just that Arthur was angry and distraught over having been abandoned in a foreign country with no money to his name, it was that despite sending for the boy to rejoin him out of guilt and thus giving him hope that they would live together again, Paul was still insistent about going back to his long since estranged wife, even after ages of having no contact with her, and very firmly stating that he would sooner choose killing himself than any other option if she should refuse to take him back.

That’s right — that dialogue they make Paul say about not planning to walk out on him again and that they’ll go back to London? Entirely fake. Never happened according to what any of the facts tell us. …And yet, it’s clear that he didn’t want Rimbaud to leave him, either; he wanted both of his partners, even though neither of them were willing to settle for being just an ‘option’ to him at this point — much less one that he would manipulate and abuse whenever he was bored and feeling like going back to the other.

Although the exact words exchanged during the argument were less than entirely accurate, at least that much of scene 54 was true: Verlaine escalated the situation on the final day and turned his gun on his paramour because the young poet was over all of the games and indecision and just wanted to get away from him, and the older man wasn’t going to have that; he would much sooner have seen him dead than watched him walk away.

Before we get into the finer, more inaccurate details of the movie’s interpretation of that event, though, I first want to talk about something else that this scene vaguely references in the dialogue, and why I feel it was a very unfortunate decision to omit any further inclusion of it into the film as a brief scene, or at least allow us to hear a little bit more about it.

At one point, while aiming the gun at the back of Arthur’s head, Paul essentially insists that Arthur must still want to be with him deep down, because of what he had said before in his letter and the fact that his tears were visible on the paper, to which the teen coolly responds, “That was before I thought of pawning your clothes”.

The thing about this line is that, in reality, pawning the clothes was always a feasible option to him from the beginning, in terms of technicality — Arthur knew that, but he specifically chose not to pawn his lover’s clothes because he could not bear to give them up, even if it was a matter of his own survival; it was the only thing that he had remaining of Verlaine, and he refused to let go of it.

To omit this information from the movie once again just sadly lends to the narrative being pushed that Rimbaud was a cold-hearted person who was pretty much only using ‘poor’, desperately lonely Paul for his own gain, and took pleasure in intentionally destroying his life in the process, and the fact that he is shown as taking even the supposedly final threat on his life and all of the emotional intensity going on around him with either amusement and a smile or a stone cold attitude does not help matters in such a case — even if ordinarily it could possibly be taken as disbelief or simply exhaustion and disgust as he’s reaching his wit’s end with his partner’s erratic, extreme and violent behavior.

Now, with all of that said and at last out of our way, let’s get into one of the biggest and strangest inaccuracies of them all: the fact that somehow, despite this being easily one of the biggest — if not the single most — publicized moments of their entire histories, either together or individually, Total Eclipse still manages to get numerous details, and even the bigger picture of the whole incident, wrong.

What Rimbaud was feeling in that moment just before being shot in the hand, yes, is truthfully anyone’s guess; he could have been terrified, or he could’ve been numb from emotional exhaustion, indignant over all he’d been put through, and in total disbelief that his lover would necessarily follow through on his threat, as the movie could easily be interpreted to have shown us — it is mostly hearsay in regards to that event. It is understandable that the film is going to have to fill in some of those gaps in whatever way the writers personally feel best fits the facts; there is leeway wherever there is no blatant contradiction.

…However, there are also many times in this scene and the next several to follow where there is a contradiction, and yet, rather than choosing to use the information that already exists to give a very plain and clear picture of what genuinely happened, they instead trample directly over the facts in favor of their own re-imagining of two people’s actual lives.

One of the less serious examples of this is in having Verlaine say and do nothing but cry on his knees on the floor at the time of firing upon his affair partner, when in reality we are told that in this moment, he had seemed to have taken a much more openly violent and vindictive approach, shouting something akin to “I’ll teach you how to leave!” (roughly translated from the original, “Je t'apprendrai a vouloir partir!”).

Setting aside petty dialogue choices, however, there are also much, much bigger matters — such as the fact that this movie implies that, immediately after the shooting, some random people within the hotel find Verlaine and Rimbaud from the sound of the gunshots, arrest Verlaine for his crime, and then take the teenager off for surgery as the older man is still being tried, but this is in no way anywhere remotely close to the truth.

No charges were initially pressed against Verlaine at all for his actions — not from anyone at the hotel, and not from Arthur, who not only dismissed his injury as being superficial at the time, but also forgave Paul for it under the understanding that he would be leaving him still. The elder poet agreed to this, but insisted — allegedly along with his own mother, whom was there visiting Verlaine at the time — upon walking him to the station personally that night to see him off.

The arrest of Paris’ once-esteemed poet only came to pass when, during the course of that final trip, Verlaine allegedly started acting quite suspicious and concerning; it was at that time that the much younger man noticed that he was still carrying the revolver in his pocket, and, sincerely believing that Paul intended to murder him rather than let him leave, immediately went into a panic and ran to the nearest policeman, frantically begging for Verlaine’s apprehension.

After the removal of the bullet from his hand, the teen would eventually come to have guilt and attempt to withdraw the charges, but by then the investigation — including Mathilde’s request for a thorough physical examination of her husband and an interrogation of the man into the nature of his relationship with Rimbaud — had already run its course, and he was found guilty of both wounding with a firearm and sodomy/pederasty (which was considered an aggravating element), and was sentenced to prison for two years.

I have sat and thought about this particular chunk of information for the longest time, trying to figure out why in the world Total Eclipse — this movie which is so incredibly bent on maximum drama and shock value — would possibly choose to omit all of it when it could so easily use it as fuel to ramp up the angst of this relationship tenfold, and, apart from perhaps some strange sort of budget issue which somehow led them to prioritize much less important scenes over the literal climax of the film, I can only ever come back to one conclusion: plausible deniability.

Yes, Paul Verlaine is very decidedly an asshole even within this film; he is a liar, he is a cheater, he abuses his wife in numerous terrible ways, and he even attempted to kill his affair partner, but as I’ve said countless times before, all of this is always framed within the context of it being an alcohol-fueled, spur-of-the-moment and instantly, deeply regretted action brought on only by Rimbaud’s dark influence on his once-perfect and happy life.

Going out one morning and buying a gun for nondescript reasons while drunk and depressed, completely as-of-yet unaware that his partner is really serious about leaving him, that’s one thing; with the way that even after finding out for certain, he talks of having threatened to his wife that he’d commit suicide if she didn’t take him back, then eventually moves on to stating in random succession he was going to shoot himself, then Arthur, then everybody, it’s presented as a completely unmeditated thing — and it probably was, at the time, as far as anyone can say.

But to present the rest of the situation to us accurately — to have him actually make the conscious, premeditated choice to put the gun in his pocket before meeting up with his own Mom and walking Arthur to the station, that is no longer just some drunken, angry or devastated spur-of-the-moment pulling of a trigger; it’s a planned-out murder that he actively thought about ahead of time and decided to carry out anyway. It — just like making any mention of him having tried to murder other people multiple times before — would completely shatter the facade that he was technically not to blame by reason of having just acted without any forethought due to intoxication.

…And if they’ve established him as any of that, well…then they can’t make this movie out to the bittersweet and tumultuous story of the man who, even after being put through hell and back, still heroically saved and preserved his crazy genius ex-lover’s poems against his prudish family’s wishes and put them out into the world so they could be remembered and appreciated and change the course of the literary world, even at the cost of his own career — and given all of this and especially the very ending of the film, as I said near the beginning of this subsection, that’s clearly the narrative that they want to push here.

As for their final, brief reunion in Black Forest, Germany, after Verlaine served his two-year sentence, yes, that did happen, but once more not anywhere close to the way it was depicted; it was only after trying to make amends one last time with his estranged and soon-to-be ex-wife and failing that he once more met up with his former lover, planning to take his poetry and try to help get it published. By this time, having lost his spark after the end of their relationship and burned out into nothingness, Arthur had given up writing in favor of working a steady job, his creative energy evidently defeated by the world.

When all was said and done, despite supposedly having converted to Catholicism while in prison, the older man ended up nevertheless briefly reigniting their relationship within only a few hours of being in Rimbaud’s presence, only to later pedal backwards and reject him again in the name of his faith, leading to one final argument and spelling the very end of their time together — marking the very last time they would ever see each other.

Strangely, as I’ve mentioned before, this scene does seem to make an apparent one-off reference to the fact that Arthur was the one who got him arrested — which contradicts completely with the film’s plot, but…at this point, I’ve kind of stopped trying to make sense of their contradictory writing.

What bothers me far more is, as I’ve alluded to before and inevitably comes with this “Paul was overall a good person before and after Rimbaud” narrative, how undeservingly and frankly revoltingly romantic they tried to make the ending — and now that we’ve at last reached the very end of this lengthy mess of a subsection and I’ve hopefully convinced you that there’s more than enough evidence to support what I am saying, I can finally speak on that.

At the end of Total Eclipse, the script tries its very hardest to sell us the idea that despite allegedly losing his career and presumably also his wife thanks to his “great and radiant sin” of an affair partner whom he has not seen in nearly two decades, Verlaine regardless remains madly in love only with and faithful to Arthur by choosing to remain in loneliness ever since their parting, whilst Rimbaud himself had eventually moved on, but most of this is just so horribly untrue.

While there is at least some extremely vague room for speculation on if Arthur had ever found another potential partner, it is clear at the very least from his very last letter to Paul near the end of his life that he still held strong feelings for him; meanwhile, it is widely known and understood that within a mere two years of their final in-person parting, and while his divorce with his wife was still being finalized, Paul had already met and gotten with another 17 year old boy who was one of his students — a relationship which he maintained for a full six years before the young man tragically passed away due to an illness, leaving him utterly devastated.

Not only this, but whatever the effects of the rise in popularity of Rimbaud’s revolutionary writing may or may not have speculatively had on Verlaine’s literary career, it is beyond deceptive to frame Paul as having not benefited in any way socially or financially from publishing his ex-partner’s poetry entirely without his knowledge while he was still alive, much less posthumously, without ever involving any of his living relatives in the matter; furthermore, all their speculation aside, we are actually given no genuine reason by any known reputable historical record I could find to suspect that it even was his former lover’s writings that caused his reputation or popularity to ever take a dip to begin with.

Certainly, there was a point in time where he struggled financially to the point of becoming practically homeless and resorting to living in the slums and hospitals and spending most of his time in cafés, but this had absolutely nothing to do with Arthur whatsoever; rather, it was because, after getting out of prison for attempting to strangle and murder his own mother yet again, shortly after the death of his most recent partner, he had ended up jobless and on the streets without her to run to, and rather than trying to clean himself up and start over again, he instead continued to drink his life away, only making scraps of money from the very occasional conference or written text — at least, until the rediscovery of his older works and the outrageousness of his strange behavior eventually led to him regaining an income, as people even began referring to him as the “Prince of Poets”.

By the time that Rimbaud had died, he had already become a very recognized and respected poet again in the eyes of many, despite his perpetual alcoholism, so the fact that the film attempts to paint him as having suffered greatly for his support of the young visionary is nothing short of insidious.

Perhaps almost the worst of all in my eyes, though, is the fact that this film has the absolute gall to even take it so far as to imply that, even after all Arthur had been put through mentally, physically, and emotionally time and time again — just like Mathilde — the one halfway-decent thing that Verlaine, his abuser and attempted murderer, did for him after his death by preserving and making any works not already possessed by the rest of the Rimbaud family known to the world was apparently enough for him to have earned the younger man’s eternal love and respect from the grave, as the writers make him return from the spirit realm to not only appear before Paul in the bar and kiss his hand, but also apparently visit him every night for the rest of the aging poet’s life and live with him in eternal happiness.

Now, don’t misread me here: I’m in no way trying to imply that Arthur was a perfect saint — quite the contrary, actually; throughout the course of their relationship and even for a short time prior in his life in general, he certainly made his fair share of mistakes, a good number of bad or otherwise just plain inadvisable decisions, and partook in a few behaviors that were deeply unhealthy at best and more than a bit toxic at worst, but his and Verlaine’s situations and action are by no means comparable.

Having grown up in a poor, single-parent household with a mother who was extremely cold, strict, controlling and abusive to the point of not only physical violence but also starving her children for days on end — not to mention having additionally been the victim of a gang-rape in his teens, in a situation that furthermore left him scarred as one of the sole, if not the only, survivor amongst a large number of communards — Rimbaud, still only a mere 16 years old when he met Paul, was most certainly not in any sort of state to be capable of comprehending or engaging in any sort of normal, healthy romantic or even platonic relationship with anyone due to the horridly unhealthy evironment he had grown up in.

Verlaine, on the other hand, was in a complete and total position of power over him from the very start, considering that throughout their entire affair, he was the one who possessed all of the money (financial power and control), provided the boy a place to stay and held all of the social status required for Rimbaud to gain any standing in the life path of his choosing (social and workplace power and control, and complete reign over whether or not his lover would have to return to the home he’d worked so hard to escape from in the first place), was older, bigger, and probably much stronger than him — not to mention definitely more prone to physical violence, and homicidal thoughts and actions — (seniority, physical advantage and power) and by entering into a romantic relationship with him after taking him in, was able to establish an emotional hold over him as well, with which he could manipulate and/or blame him over any trouble that arised out of it.

And yes, there’s no overlooking the fact that Arthur was, himself, also partly responsible for the fact that the affair took place — at least insofar as that he also had to make the decision to be with Verlaine, despite knowing all too well that he was married — but the one with whom the blame ultimately lies, above all, was the man who was already married, for actively choosing to cheat on his wife when he could have just practiced self-restraint.

Furthermore, I think it also bears mentioning that, while this was fairly clearly not the case for Verlaine in hindsight and it does not in any way lessen or excuse the suffering that Mathilde endured over the matter, considering that it was quite common in those days for any remotely queer folk to marry into loveless marriages and even raise families with people to whom they were not even physically or romantically attracted purely for the sake of maintaining a good image and/or social and financial status, it is more than entirely plausible that Rimbaud may have interpreted Paul’s interest in him and his self-proclaimed emotional and intellectual incompatibility with his wife as having been a result of such a scenario when they met — thus leading him to think that their extramarital relationship would be freeing him from a lifetime of unhappiness due to societal obligation.

There is no doubting that Mathilde was every bit as much of a victim to her husband and his affair in real life as she was in the film, if not more, but no matter how much Total Eclipse rearranges or omits real life events so that it can imply otherwise, Verlaine was not some hapless victim to a devilish Rimbaud who lured him in and destroyed his once perfectly innocent, happy and respectable life and marriage; Paul Verlaine was, by all accounts of genuine history, a manipulative, indecisive, unhealthily clingy, physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive drunkard with a strong tendency towards homicidal urges and a penchant for only dating teenagers who were always at least a decade younger than his mature adult self — both long before, during, and after Arthur was a part of his life, until basically his dying day.

Rimbaud — who, incidentally, turned out an overall normal, healthy, and respectable, if fairly withdrawn, human being after his relationship with Paul was over and he had gotten away from his mother — apart not being his original partner, was just about as much of a victim in this whole scenario as Mathilde, just with even less of a support system to turn to, given the nature of his relationship with his family (especially his only parent) and the fact that the only vaguely friendly acquaintances he really had while living with Paul were those that were inherently said lover’s friends first. (To say nothing of the fact that even openly talking about the true nature of their relationship would have been utterly forbidden and met with complete hostility or mockery at best, if he had chosen to open up about it to anyone.)

So yes, in light of all of the above, I honestly find it extremely out-of-touch at best and absolutely vile at worst that Total Eclipse) seems to have taken the stance it has in all of this, much less that it would choose to make either of the two victims — whether living or dead — return to him to give him the love, happiness, and devotion he supposedly ��deserves’ and has ‘earned’ through doing one sort of good and allegedly selfless thing at the end of the film.

Other

Have I mentioned that this movie is nearly two hours long, and that at least more than half of that runtime is spent being completely disingenuine about the events that it openly and explicitly claims at the beginning are all being represented 100% truthfully?

Oh, I have? Okay then, moving on.

After all that I’ve said in this whole section, I honestly don’t think that there’s anything much more to say for this part. I guess one unfortunate but not at all surprising fact is that, adjusting for inflation, this movie cost about £12,778,266.00 to make in today’s money, but only made back £641,059.97 — which is only a little over 4% of the cost.

[Click here for Part 0: Preamble]

[Click here for Part 1: The Good]

[Click here for Part 3: The Takeaway]

#linklethehistorian #my thoughts #thoughts #meta #movie review #Total Eclipse 1995 movie review #total eclipse 1995 #arthur rimbaud #paul verlaine #leonardo dicaprio #david thewlis

3 notes · View notes