Les Destinees

This sumptuous film follows the story of a marriage caught in the turmoil of social change. The beautiful Emmanuelle Béart portrays Pauline, wife of the heir to a prosperous porcelain industry. In 1900, when first she meets her future husband, Jean Barnery (Charles Berling), he's a Protestant minister unhappily married to another woman (Isabelle Huppert). After a scandalous divorce, Jean and Pauline marry and move to Switzerland, where they live a briefly idyllic existence, but Jean is drawn back into the family business, which is rocked by the rise of unions, the brutality of World War I, and the economic depression that followed. Throughout, Pauline fights to retain some semblance of their original love. Les Destinées manages to be both intimate and epic, every scene built from carefully observed details in setting and psychology. In the end, the portrait of an enduring marriage is richly affecting. --Bret Fetzer