Les Destinées (2000)

61% of critics liked it
(49 reviews)
40% of users liked it
(643 ratings)

Acclaimed French filmmaker Olivier Assayas follows up on the international success of Fin Août, Début Septembre and Irma Vep with this sweeping adaptation of the sprawling three-volume tome by Jacques Chardonne. Set in three chapters spanning from the beginning of the 1900s to after WWI, the first… More Acclaimed French filmmaker Olivier Assayas follows up on the international success of Fin Août, Début Septembre and Irma Vep with this sweeping adaptation of the sprawling three-volume tome by Jacques Chardonne. Set in three chapters spanning from the beginning of the 1900s to after WWI, the first section takes place in the fictional village of Barbazac, located in the Cognac region. Protestant pastor Jean Barnery (Charles Berling) learns of his wife Nathalie's (Isabelle Huppert) infidelity from the village grapevine and sends his daughter away. At the same time, 20-year-old Pauline (Emmanuelle Beart) returns to the village after the death of her father. Pauline and Jean are almost immediately attracted to each other when they first meet at a ball. Soon Jean installs Nathalie and their daughter in an apartment, files for divorce, and resigns as minister. The second chapter opens with Pauline visiting Jean, who is bedridden in a Parisian hotel from tuberculosis. Upon his recovery, they marry and live for a spell in Switzerland, until Jean's family entreat him to return to Limoges and take over the floundering family porcelain business. The final chapter opens with bombs of WWI: Jean is sent to the front, while Pauline works as a nurse. When the war finally draws to a close, Jean struggles to keep the business afloat. He raises the ire of his workers and stockholders alike by freezing wages and slashing dividends, but his fastidious attention to detail soon makes his company the finest producer of porcelain in Europe. Yet as the economic climate of the continent slowly worsens, so does his business -- and his health. This film was first screened at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi

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Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 3 hr.
Directed By: Olivier Assayas, Bruno Pésery
Written By: Olivier Assayas, Jacques Chardonne, Jacques Fieschi
Genres: Romance, Art House & International, Drama

In Theaters: Feb 1, 2002 Limited
On DVD: Oct 22, 2002
Studio: Winstar

Critic Reviews

David Rooney, Variety
A massive undertaking and an accomplished piece of filmmaking in a solid tradition of intelligent, meticulous literary adaptations.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Assayas is masterful in using offscreen sounds to conjure up a novelistic sense of milieu and in handling various ceremonies, and the film's lush texture explains why he called it his anti-Dogma film.
Susan Stark, Detroit News
More than a few of us would show up for the chance to see and hear Huppert and Beart read from the Limoges telephone directory. Assayas can count himself lucky for that.
John Monaghan, Detroit Free Press
Opens at a funeral, ends on the protagonist's death bed and doesn't get much livelier in the three hours in between.
Tom Sime, Dallas Morning News
The movie is relentlessly gorgeous, and brims over with color, light and movement like a room-filling Monet canvas.
Desson Thomson, Washington Post
No number of fantastic sets, extras, costumes and spectacular locales can disguise the emptiness at the center of the story.
, Film4
Despite an off-putting premise, this is a sumptuous drama boasting substance as well as spectacle.
Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
Rich Cline, Film Threat
We're kept intrigued by the characters and where they're heading, and the gorgeous cinematography and production design help us submerge ourselves in their world.
Harry Guerin, RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland)
Enduring love but exhausting cinema.
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews
The filmmaker's heart is in the right place...
Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing
An empty shell of an epic rather than the real deal.
Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
It is...very good at showing how people can and do change over the course of a lifetime, how faith can be abandoned and then picked up, how love can ebb and mutate.
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com
An exhausting family drama about a porcelain empire and just as hard a flick as its subject matter.
Frank Swietek, One Guy's Opinion
Gorgeous to look at but insufferably tedious and turgid...a curiously constricted epic.
Elbert Ventura, PopMatters
Death awaits us all, but Assayas, with a humanist's generosity, offers his characters the greatest gift art can give: immortality.
Kim Morgan, Oregonian
Rich in detail, gorgeously shot and beautifully acted, Les Destinees is, in its quiet, epic way, daring, inventive and refreshingly unusual.

Read all 17 critic reviews

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Featured Audience Ratings

Walter M

[font=Century Gothic][color=blue]"School of Flesh" starts out with a wealthy fashion executive, Dominique(Isabelle Huppert) who wanders into a nightclub with a friend one night and meets a bisexual hustler(Vincent Martinez). She returns a couple of nights later and returns… More
[font=Century Gothic][color=blue]"School of Flesh" starts out with a wealthy fashion executive, Dominique(Isabelle Huppert) who wanders into a nightclub with a friend one night and meets a bisexual hustler(Vincent Martinez). She returns a couple of nights later and returns home with him. Now, I can understand why that would happen but why honestly continue the affair with somebody as shallow as he is, if it is only physical? Also, is this something that Dominique does on a weekly basis or is it part of a midlife crisis? I think, director Benoit Jacquot's conclusion might be something more negative, considering the movie's ending. This might be a statement on how a successful businesswoman cannot commit to a relationship. "School of Flesh" is a curiously flat movie about an affair that goes on too long.[/color][/font] [font=Century Gothic][color=#0000ff][/color][/font] [font=Century Gothic][color=red]"Les Destinees" is an epic drama that starts in 1900 with a funeral(for the 19th century?) and continues until 1930. It focuses on a protestant minister, Jean Barnery(Charles Berling) who is in exile from his prosperous family of porcelain makers and his relationship with a young woman, Pauline(Emmanuelle Beart). At the start of the movie, Barnery is in the process of separating from his wife, due to an unspecified scandal. The movie tries to be a sprawling epic but we never learn much about any characters except for Jean and Pauline. All the other characters just seem extraneous and come and go as they please. But on the other hand, we did learn a great deal of how to make pottery and bourbon.[/color][/font]