(1991) Eternity is in the moment. Having a factual basis in biography, director James Lapine's romantic costume comedy (screenplay by Sarah Kernochan) of the novelist George Sand (Judy Davis), the nom de plume of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin Baronne Dudevant, and her love affairs, has a contemporary air of language and conduct (e.g., in the 1830s George says her mother's in a nursing home; her preadolescent son employs "duh" as might a child of the 1990s) that manages to mock period drama while simultaneously preserving the emotional truths of the characters.

I took pleasure in this film as I would 19th-century music being performed by modern musicians on modern instruments in a modern theater: the music we hear is not exactly what Chopin, Liszt, and their audiences heard when they composed and performed it, since it is no longer fresh without precedent, yet it still moves us with the force of their undiminished vitality. (As with the Beatles taking part in comedic films for their fans, these famous composers are portrayed as characters in a light farce.)

In search of the perfection of love since her childhood, George (who wears men's clothes and leads a depraved life), writing her memoirs at about the age of thirty, having thrown off her paramour, the poet, novelist, and dramatist Alfred de Musset (Mandy Patinkin) - who says of her that she'd drink the blood of her children from her lover's skull without feeling any qualms - weary of being mistress to Felicien Mallefille (Georges Corraface), "a menace to the future of art," confesses to her friend Countess Marie D'Agoult (Bernadette Peters): "I used to think I'd die of suffocation when I was married. Now it's my freedom that's killing me."

Early on Franz Liszt's mistress and mother-to-be of his three children (one of whom, by the way, Cosima, would wed Richard Wagner) Marie beckons to George where Franz is playing piano to come to the other side of the aisle from the snobs and hypocrites; later after she has signed her own name to a missive of love George has written for her to deliver to Frederic Chopin (Hugh Grant), jealous and duplicitous Marie offers George advice: "You won't get him with a dress; on the contrary, my dear. I know the man. He is not a man; he is a woman. He is all emotion and refinement. He has very few defenses. You must win him as a man wins a woman; if anyone can do it, you can, George." Immediately afterward Marie works at cross purposes, telling Chopin that George has merely bet Alfred that she can seduce him.

From her initial encounter with the overly sensitive and appalled Chopin in his bedroom in the home of Duchess D'Anton (Emma Thompson) - "I am your slave, and you have summoned me with your music" - until this determined, independent feminist (more Helen Gurley Brown than Gloria Steinem) declares, "I love strongly, exclusively, steadfastly," George idolizes her angel, her dream.

Starved for culture, importing the artistic geniuses ("gang of parasites," in her husband's opinion) of Paris to her country estate, since Duke D'Anton has denied her a residence in the city, the ridiculously enthusiastic Duchess invites Liszt (Julian Sands), Chopin ("Polish corpse" with his frail lungs and eternal cough), Sand ("allergic to aristocracy"), and the painter Eugene Delacroix (Ralph Brown), who's willing to go wherever there's free food, good scenery, and no bills, while the Duke goes hunting.

During a dinner discussion of the question of God's existence, in response to the view that God exists but isn't worth denying, Mallefille observes: "God exists but he's no longer loved so he hides away to conceal his broken heart." George then offers that in Chopin's divine music emotion and science are in rapport.

Alfred arrives to defend George; Mallefille (threatening to kill George and himself) challenges the poet to a duel; Eugene ravishes the Duchess; and following three days of "stupid rain," the great geniuses enact Alfred's play of Noah and the Flood (in which pairs of artists are to be saved on the Ark), subtly but savagely mocking their host and hostess - to which Chopin decries their ungrateful impertinence. "Art does not apologize," retorts Alfred.

The purpose of all one's preparation and suffering for one's art, Chopin tells George, referring to his impromptu composition to which she has been listening beneath his piano, is to make something sound perfectly effortless: "If I finish it, I think it will finish me." Immediacy must be eternal.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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