Total Eclipse
With Leonardo DiCaprio and David Thewlis.
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Oddly, considering that Holland is a much more subtle artist than Stone, the wellsprings of her art and of his political rants are similar. It makes sense for Stone to be inspired by orgiastic, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, melodramatic, beautiful young men, because his films display similar characteristics, like self-indulgence and lack of control. Holland’s films aren’t like this. And when she was asked at a preview screening at the Film Center a few weeks ago why her films boast these young male protagonists, she replied simply: “I like them. My favorite ages for men are 15 to 20 and 80 to 100.” Holland admits that Rimbaud’s work is symbolic and difficult, and that much of his appeal is based not on his art but on his life–a wild, flashing, night moth existence spent stealing, breaking laws, having fun, and, in Holland’s own words, “drinking and fucking.”
One of Leonardo DiCaprio’s recent films, The Basketball Diaries, includes a ludicrous but effective scene in which he enters a classroom and shoots the teacher and all the students with a machine gun. One of the only scenes in the film that works, it succeeds not because it’s horrifying but because in his trenchcoat with his catlike eyes, puffy cheeks, and swollen lips, DiCaprio looks exactly like a runway model. In Total Eclipse, lying naked next to Verlaine, DiCaprio is an instrument of seduction as potent as his look-alike Brigette Bardot; he’s the other woman, the temptress who steals the older poet from his wife and child.
But ironically the film’s failure as a work of art about artists may be what helps it succeed as a trashy guilty pleasure. Critic David Thomson once wrote, describing the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, that his theme–“feelings of regret”–is “oddly spiked by a type of visual lust. In La Notte, for instance, Jeanne Moreau walks aimlessly through Milan, witnessing the proof of social, emotional, and intellectual disarray. Yet that walk is erotic in the way it restricts her to the status of object.” Of course, we may ask why such a restriction is erotic. Is it because, by reducing the complexity of a character, viewers are forced to contemplate only his or her physical surface? Is shallowness therefore erotic? Is the two-dimensional Jane Fonda of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella sexier than the three-dimensional Jane Fonda of Alan Pakula’s Klute? Does eroticism necessarily imply a reduction? If so, then Total Eclipse could be said to succeed in this superficial way.
