Total Eclipse

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the young poet Arthur Rimbaud opposite David Thewlis as Paul Verlaine in this dramatization of their real-life passionate, destructive relationship. Verlaine is married to his young, devoted wife Mathilde (Romane Bohringer) when he abandons her to pursue an affair with the teenage Rimbaud.

Directed by Agnieszka Holland, the film portrays Verlaine's marriage as a conventional bourgeois arrangement that cannot contain his homosexual desires, showing how the collision between social expectation and authentic identity leads to violence and tragedy. The film depicts one of literary history's most famous examples of a closeted marriage.