I loved this movie and I don't know to what extent this movie is near to the original story. I have read the life of George Sand and was amazed by her character. A character so tough when it has to do with freedom of doing what one wants. George Sand was one of my best female characters next to Mary Wolstoncroft, Jane Austin, Emmeline Pankhurst and the famous five. Juliette Binoche has played the role magnificently close and made it feel like I was watching the original Sand.The love story is so beautiful specially the scene when Benoit Magimel sleeps on the street ground under the rain when Sand comes to visit him in her carriage. Waw!... I mean this is a charming scene, it says a lot about the feelings of love.

If you have any interest in French Romanticism, or romanticism in general, see this film. The story is taken from both Musset's & Sand's accounts of the affair that took place. If a film is to be made about a poet, use the poets feelings and even words at the most opportune times, this film does that, and then some. This film is well crafted, from every aspect of its making. The performances by Binoche & Magimel are both riveting and heart wrenching. If this love were a battle, the filmmaker would most definitely taken the side of Sand. As the truth of this affair left Musset's heart dispirited until his death. Even his friends, like Eugene Delacroix, have said that his pen was a poison that infected his reader like a virus. But all histoire aside, as a film, this is an exquisite piece of work, that is both heart-breaking and entertaining. In the words of the central characters, "Shame on you, who are the first to show me treason. The horror and anger, which made me lose my reason."-Alfred de Musset "The angels are no more pure than the heart of a young man who loves truthfully."-George SandAbove all watch this film and judge for yourself.

I was really hoping to find some special quality in the two main characters that I could like. However, self absorbed people are usually too melodramatic about every single aspect of their lives and so I had no sympathy for their predicament at all. So, I settled back and enjoyed Julliet Binochet at work. The film was meticulously crafted and the settings and costumes were wonderful, so I got the time machine effect, too. If you like historical melodrama, you might enjoy this.

I'm a great admirer of George Sand's works, so I was curious about this film, and have been ever since I heard that it came out in France in 1999. I finally got a chance to see it two weeks ago in New York. Diane Kurys' film is well-acted and beautifully shot. Unfortunately, viewers won't be much enlightened about Sand or Musset as writers by watching it. Nor is it a convincing love story. Both of these faults are mostly due to a mediocre script.The basic outline of the facts of Sand's relationship with Musset are there, but any sense of *why* they had such a fatal obsession with each other is lacking. Lots of inane dialogue about love isn't enough! The two are barely together before they're fighting, and Musset is such an unpleasant, selfish, manipulative and immature fellow (a characterization that's apparently pretty true to the facts) that Sand's devotion to him is hard to fathom. Surprisingly, from a filmmaker with a feminist slant, you learn very little about Sand's beliefs as a woman or an artist. She seems like a sane person, though, and a hard-working writer (and that is historically accurate), but there's no depth, in spite of all that the lovely, talented Juliet Binoche can do. The character as written simply isn't interesting, and that's sad, because the real life George Sand was a fascinating woman. The film's portrait of the Romantic era and its writers isn't much better. Yes, I suppose with all the bad behavior and opium-gulping, Musset and some others were like the childish, spoiled rock stars of today (which may have been the filmmaker's point), but there's no sense of what their work was like. When Sand and Musset talk about their writing and its meaning, they sound like rank amateurs. The one thing you learn about Sand's novel *Lelia* from the film is that it was about female frigidity and how few men are capable of arousing a woman. (Naturally, Musset soon cures Sand of her "frigidity." Hoo-boy). In reality, *Lelia* is a complex attempt to address many philosophical issues of the age and a struggle to find the meaning of existence, with or without God, but that doesn't make good cinema, I guess. It's easier to suppose that women are always going to write about sex, rather than to admit that they have any ideas of their own. If you want real insight, you'd be far better off reading Sand's works (something like her most magnificent short story, "The Marquise," for starters). Or how about calling a moratorium on films about Sand's love life and actually bringing one of her works to the screen? That would be a real tribute.