Watching Impromptu, a movie about the love affair between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin, was rather like attending my first professional writers' conference. You have an opinion of your peers based on their work, and then you meet them in real life and discover they are very different from your idealistic notions. This is not a bad thing, actually -- I don't think anyone should occupy a pedestal -- but it is disconcerting to say the least. So was this movie.
The premise: Radical novelist Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (Judy Davis), who lives in Paris as George Sand, falls in love first with the music of Frédéric Chopin (Hugh Grant), and then pursues the composer like a lovestruck groupie, this despite having a complicated life and string of past and present lovers creating havoc in it. Chopin, the only decent character in the entire production, is in a health decline with tuberculosis, and really just wants to be left alone. Chaos ensues as Sand chases Chopin around Paris, into the countryside and ultimately seduces him, dismissing his serious illness as a little cough and otherwise behaving like she's on drugs. The rest of the characters and plot seem like a sad, sour parody of romance, but I imagine it's based on what really happened.
Although I didn't care for the movie, there are wonderful actors in it: Emma Thompson as the fawning socialite duchess d'Antan, who ends up getting a rude dose of reality of her own, and Mandie Patinkin, who plays Sand's ex-lover Alfred De Musset with purely vicious glee. I was sad to see Julian Sands playing Franz Liszt; I still can't quite believe he's gone. Bernadette Peters as Marie d'Agoult was inspired casting; she nearly outshone Judy Davis. If you want to tolerate a lot of overly dramatic nonsense to see famous people behaving like toddlers having temper tantrums, Impromptu is the movie for you. Available to watch for free on Tubi.
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