Gratuitous Llama Netflix Movie Review

I ran off the 1991 film Impromptu last evening, in part because the Missus has had a hard couple days and I knew she would enjoy an eye-full of a young Hugh Grant. If you haven't seen this film before, it's the story of the beginning of the love affair between Frederic Chopin and George Sand, aka Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, Baroness Dudevant (and ironically ends with them driving away together for Mallorca, at which Mediterranean resort their affair began to end).

Being a Mozart fanatic, I can take a film like Amadeus and tear it into little pieces, dancing on the fragments. Here, I am somewhat handicapped. While I certainly don't mind Chopin's music, I'm not particularly interested in the period. The result is that I know far less about his life than Mozart's and I know next to nothing about Sand, other than that she was an eccentric proto-feminist novelist.

Nonetheless, I do enjoy this film, in part because I think it gets a fair number of things right. For instance, Chopin is presented as a proper, almost old-fashioned young man, considerably out of sync with the decadent artistic circle of Paris in the 1830's. In contrast, the composer Franz Liszt, whose music I loathe as nothing more than an exercise in egomania, is portrayed as the lout that he was. I don't know whether Chopin actually got up and scolded Liszt, Delacroix and the other bohemians at the D'Antan's estate for being ugly and condescending to their hosts, but it would be nice to believe so.

I also enjoy the film because it treats its main characters as people, not as demi-legends. All the while I was watching, I couldn't help wishing that somebody would go back and tackle the lives of Mozart and, say, Beethoven on this same plane. (I think it was Ford Prefect in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who said something to the effect that wasn't it enough to admire the beauty of a garden without also having to believe there were faeries at the bottom of it.)

Incidentally, I've got Amadeus somewhere in the queue again. It's been, oh, at least fifteen years since I saw it last. As you may have gathered, I hate the heavily romanticized, apocryphal version of Mozart's life and this movie, unfortunately, swallows it hook, line and sinker. Not sure why I want to see it again except to indulge in some crankiness. (Oh, and to see the scene where Mozart takes the awful little tune Salieri slaved over and, in the twinkling of an eye, turns it into "Non piu andrai" from Le Nozze di Figaro. Utter balls, of course, but fun to watch.)