Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine had a tempestuous love affair in the 19th century that lasted almost two years and ended with a pistol shot and two years in a Belgian prison. This film reimagines this relationship through a modern lens and with a splash of color.
Arthur and Paul go their separate ways in London and meet again in Brussels for a final goodbye. Une jeunesse aimable imagines the last moments of love between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. At first glance we know that we are not in the 19th century, but when we hear Verlaine’s voice saying the contents of a letter written to Rimbaud we also know that we’re not quite in this century. It’s another time, the former and the latter simultaneously, the time of the epistolary novel and the time of poetry, real time and dream time, the feverish time of troubled love and the hallucinogenic time of absinthe. It is in this powerful evocation of different times, of mental and poetic states, of vivid presences and reincarnations, in a sometimes tinted black and white, that this film is woven and enchants us. (Cláudia Marques)
