Les Destinees

French writer-director Olivier Assayas departs from his trademark edgy explorations of ultra-modern relationships with this exquisitely mounted adaptation of Jacques Chardonne's novel Les Destinees Sentimentales. Over the course of its three-hour running time, Assayas and co-writer Jacques Fieschi chart the vicissitudes of love and commerce during the first three decades of the 20th century, as an age of unquestioning wealth and luxury slowly draws to a close. Few things better symbolize this genteel age and the primacy of aesthetics over the often-grim reality of modern industrial life than the fine porcelain produced for generations by the Barnery family's f...