1873 - The precocious French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, has eloped with his mentor, Paul Verlaine, to Camden Town, London
Alchemy of the Word is not a phrase the film invented. Arthur Rimbaud used it as the title of a section of A Season in Hell, which he was writing in 1873, the year this film covers, and in which he describes inventing the colour of vowels and boasts that he had found a way to write silences. These fifteen minutes are the room that sentence came out of: a cold set of lodgings in Camden Town, with a paraffin stove and no money, and two men who cannot decide whether they are saving each other or finishing each other off.
1873 - The precocious, French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, has eloped with his mentor - the older, married Paul Verlaine - to Camden Town, where they are struggling to keep the faith in their love and their work. Despite the downward spiral of poverty and violence, it is here that Rimbaud will pen his aptly named masterpiece, 'A Season in Hell.'
Love of a perverse kind runs through it, and what came out of the relationship with Verlaine was the work Rimbaud wrote and published and is remembered for.
The domestic detail is what sells it. Their advertisement offers French lessons in the finer points, by two Parisian gentlemen, one of whom is not Parisian at all. Six lessons a week would cover the rent, and they cannot agree whether that money is for drink or for writing. Verlaine has left a wife and a small son in France, and keeps announcing that he will go back and be respectable and put it all right. Rimbaud tells him he will be bourgeois and boring inside a year. Both of them are right.
Very little time was left to either of them. Within months Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist in Brussels and went to prison for it. Within a few years Rimbaud had given up poetry altogether, before he was twenty-five, and gone abroad to trade. The film dramatises none of that. It stays in the lodgings, on the argument that everything afterwards was decided there.
This film explores what good can come from our most difficult, earth-shattering experiences. It is a film about searching for transcendent beauty in the prison of hellish reality.
Fifteen minutes, written and directed by Jessica Benhamou. Some of the dialogue is Rimbaud's own text, spoken rather than recited.