Les destinées sentimentales

The movie I saw the other night was Les destinées sentimentales by Olivier Assayas. Emmanuelle Béart and Charles Berling (the actor in Ridicule, if you've seen that) play the main characters, with Isabelle Huppert in a supporting role.

It's a bit long (just under 3 hours), but the story starts in 1900 and ends in the 1930's, so there's a lot of family drama and world events to cover. If you like costume dramas, I highly recommend this movie. I would have thought the book by Jacques Chardonne that the movie is based on would be really thick, but Amazon says it's only 441 pages.

The main character is Jean Barnery, a protestant pastor who's marriage is ending, and the young Pauline he meets. Jean's family is in the porcelain business in Limoges and the ups and downs of the industry are a large part of the story.

I don't want to give away too much of the story, but rest assured romance is a large part of the movie. The movie wasn't hard to understand in French, but I would recommend watching it with a French person because the relationships between the characters can be confusing (wait, she's the niece or the cousin, and why is he calling that man his uncle?)

I really felt they did a good job with the costumes and aging the actors. The first scenes include a ball with lots of white dresses, Gibson girl hair, and mutton sleeves. The war comes and goes, and there are the straight dresses of the 20's. The hats change as well, and the shoes and hair styles. The story of the family porcelain business was really interesting as well, because they tried to make new designs or incorporate new colors and you see how hard it is to make good china. There are a lot of mentions of selling in America and the increasing competition from Germany and Japan. One supporting character mentions the socialist party and how the workers in the factory demand a higher salary (and then go on strike when they don't get it).

The other unusual aspect of the film was that the characters were all protestant. They oftentimes mentioned the need to be overtly religious or to show their presence because there were so few of them compared to the Catholics. It's rare to see a French movie that portrays the lives of a protestant community, and it's interesting to see how it influences the story.

Normally I'm not interested in reading epic French novels, but I'm a sucker for dramatic love stories, so I might just check out the book.