If you’re not familiar with 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, writer-director Patrick Wang wants you to be. In his fourth feature in fifteen years, A. Rimbaud—and in a marked stylistic departure from his previous films—Wang stares the raw provocateur in the eyes and asks us to hold the same unblinking gaze. Moreover, he takes an avant-garde approach that strips the story of everything but the boy / man himself. The problem? Rimbaud was about as annoying as people get. And unfortunately, per Wang’s respectably novel approach, the poet is the only person in the one-man powerhouse performance film.
Over the course of three hours, we witness the lion’s share of Rimbaud’s life, from 16 to 37, after which he died of cancer. We pick up with the incredibly bored boy (played at all ages by Blake Draper) in his mid-teens in Charleville, France, where he was born. A giddy, cave-locked Rimbaud tells us of his schoolboy days, despite still being a teen—our first sign that he doesn’t have much perspective on himself. It isn’t long before he’s escaping to Paris in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, only to be immediately arrested upon his arrival at Gare du Nord for not paying the 13-Franc fare he couldn’t afford. So we lay around with him in prison and listen to him rant and rave, usually jubilant at the wonder he finds in his own thoughts and words. Across three decades, we listen to a litany of his poems, hear of his volcanic romance with Paul Verlaine, see him leave literature behind to become an explorer, and much more.
Draper is outstanding as Rimbaud. The issue is not the performer, but the subject portrayed. Rimbaud was a true libertine and transgressor, so it tracks that an accurate portrayal of him might grind a viewer down to the bone, as it does in Wang’s film. The same problem is what tanked Agnieszka Holland’s 1995 film on Rimbaud (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) Total Eclipse, which had all the funding and flailing of an extravagantly produced period piece but still fell prey to the poet’s obnoxious nature.
Here he talks endlessly about truth, Baudelaire, and himself, smirking his way through a frustratingly poetic logic. He’s so impressed with himself that it becomes mildly sickening. “Try not to cringe while reading my poems,” he says at one point, as if he knew somewhere deep down just how bothersome it was to hear him speak ad nauseam, much less read his own poetry with passion and conviction. Yet it’s the kind of film Rimbaud probably would’ve loved, had he lived to witness the birth of cinema shortly after his death.
A. Rimbaud recalls a blend between a lesser Dogville and Frederick Wiseman’s fiction film, A Couple. Wang takes inspiration from Von Trier’s experimental, vacuous, dark, spooky stage setting, employing a similar but much less involved version of the technique that’s grounded in close-ups and medium shots in order to obscure the emptiness of the space around him. It’s as if Rimbaud exists only in this cinematic void. It’s likewise hard to imagine Wang wasn’t influenced by Wiseman’s film, which consisted solely of Sophia Tolstoy reading letters between her and Leo while sitting around the woods. In both films, the approach has an unintentionally deadening effect.
The set dressing is surreal, per the subject, and intentionally sparse (e.g. a slate gray rock face, a street lamp, a jail cot, etc.), the occasional background painting setting the scene more directly (e.g. a dining room mural behind the dining table Rimbaud sits at). The lighting takes a more realist approach to inform us where and when things are happening (e.g. outside during sunset, inside at sunrise, out in the bright of day under tree-dappled light). The sound design plays a similar role to lighting in how it informs us of Rimbaud’s setting (e.g. the tweeting of birds and wind through the trees, the sounds of a bustling brasserie) but it’s usually too light in the mix to make much of an impact. Even the room tone is strangely vacant. A more immersive sound design would’ve helped transport the viewer into the mostly imagined setting more convincingly.
Wang’s last film, A Bread Factory, was so long as to be split into two feature-length parts. Oddly enough, it didn’t need to be, but I’m sure the format was more enticing to most than a four-hour feature. Here, the opposite is true. If there’s one thing A. Rimbaud could benefit from, it would be the removal of an hour, or at the very least the addition of an intermission to get away from the gratingly self-obsessed subject for a few minutes.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the edit, which ends up being one of A. Rimbaud‘s greatest strengths. Guy Maddin regular John Gurdebeke delivers a cut that elevates the material from thoughtless to thought-provoking. It can’t save the film from itself, but does add something significant to the creative micro-budget merits. For how much of a slog Wang’s project is, Gurdebeke finds ways to keep the audience engaged, the viewer’s mind moving.
Rimbaud might be the only person in the film, but he’s not the only voice. Cue: Dan Schlosberg’s riveting score (his first feature-composing credit, though he played piano on the recent West Side Story remake and music-consulted on The Fabelmans). The music—not to mention the role it plays—is tremendous from the get-go, soundtracking the sparse opening-credits sequence with dynamism and bravado. Strings, woodwinds, and brass take turns in segmented pieces, eventually bursting forth with the tonal trumpeting triumph of the arrival of royalty—the poetry royalty of Rimbaud.
At first his conversations are one-sided. We understand that he’s speaking to another person but we never see them or hear what they’re saying. We can just deduce what they might’ve said based on Rimbaud’s response. Eventually, instruments become the expressive voices Rimbaud converses with. He says something; an oboe mopes back at him in a low, whining manner. Later, strings rise with a conversational exuberance. Then they’re used to falsify the sound of people laughing. Notes go up at the end of instrumental responses to signify the asking of a question. And the score weaves in and out of being a score or being that conversation partner freely, leaving viewers in a curious state of what role it means to play each time it enters a scene.
The literary savant, who retired from writing by the age of 20, is no doubt a singular entity even today. But instead of inspiring awe at his clearly prodigious literary abilities, the boyish, out-of-control context of Rimbaud’s life strips the poetry of its depth and meaning. There’s just something unavoidably phony about a 16-year-old trying to teach us the meaning of life. The context is so damning that, for a few brief moments, it makes one question the legitimacy of poetry altogether. Is it a beautiful literary art? Or merely the serpentine language of the intolerable? The self-obsessed? The socially blinkered? Then again, I read some Rimbaud poems on the page on the way home, and something broke through: it was infinitely easier to appreciate him as a writer when he wasn’t being portrayed.
All of this combines for a wildly esoteric film that does more to suggest theater than cinema. Though the tools of cinema are on full display: Rimbaud grabs the camera and readjusts it as he speaks to us at the beginning, breaking the fourth wall; experimental tricks dip in and out, like the sudden skipping of frames/motion or the aforementioned emergence of instruments as conversation partners we can only understand through the emotion of the music. Ultimately, however, the long-winded Wang gravely overestimates an audience’s capacity to empathize with (much less take interest in) such an insufferable subject, regardless of how important he might’ve been.
A. Rimbaud opens at LA’s Laemmle NoHo 7 on Friday, November 6.
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