Rent Les Destinees Sentimentales (2000)

Deadly Dulj - Les Destinees Sentimentales review by Alphaville

This is one of those tedious talkies that French cinema makes far too many of. It opens with a domestic squabble filmed as talking heads and never gets any better. What’s the point of wide-screen if all you do is put a single talking head in the middle of it? The images are so sleep-inducing you deserve a medal if you last the whole 172 minutes.

Director Olivier Assayas simply has no sense of cinema. After this 2002 effort he went on to make other borefests such as Clouds of Sils Maria in 2015. They keep giving him money and calling him ‘acclaimed’. This film was even an official entry at Cannes, He must be stopped.

His films are everything the Nouvelle Vague railed against. Where are the new Jean-Luc and Francois when you need them?

Bad transfer - Les Destinees Sentimentales review by JW

Not a review of the film itself, but the DVD transfer here is dreadful - the film is letterboxed to about one quarter of the screen to make room for massive hardcoded subtitles. Hopefully this gets a decent remaster/reissue at some point, because the viewing experience here is about equivalent to those pirated DVDs of a bygone age filmed with a shaky camcorder at the back of the cinema.