Subtitles have a way of scaring off a large percentage of American filmgoers. Normally rational audience members become hesitant and fearful in the face of subtitles, desperately worried that watching a subtitled movie means having to sit through an extremely long, boring period piece with little in the way of action, comedy or drama. This stereotype is cultivated in high schools across the country with teachers insisting on including Vietnamese and French films as part of their curriculum and is perpetuated with the release of films like Children of the Century.

Focusing on 19^th century French author George Sand--the pen name for the Baroness Aurore Dudevant (Juliette Binoche), Children of the Century is co-writer/director Diane Kurys 135 minute epic about Sand's somewhat forbidden romance with fellow writer Alfred de Musset (Benoit Magimel).

Dudevant is an interesting historical character. Writing under the male pseudonym of Sand, cross-dressing and generally throwing her own brand of free love around, Dudevant successfully captured the intrigued ire of post-revolutionary France, in much the same way Ann Coulter does today (minus the cross-dressing and free love, of course). Unfortunately, the nature of her on-again, off-again relationship with de Musset does nothing to engage 21^st century film audiences.

There are two major problems with Children of the Century that play a weird sort of chicken-or-the-egg game as to which has a bigger impact on the film. Dudevant and de Musset have a dysfunctional relationship at best (he visits whores, does opium and has severe anger issues, while she strangely enjoys the abuse he ladles out) and neither character generates any kind of sympathy. The result is a peculiarly distant examination of a doomed relationship between two troubled people that no one cares about.

Sadly, there isn't much else Kurys could have done to make the material more palatable. A shorter running time might have helped slightly, but the relationship between Dudevant and de Musset was what it was; to make it more harmonious or smooth flowing would have changed the very nature of the project itself.

Plot material aside though, Children of the Century looks superb. Shot on location in both Paris and Venice, in some of the very places that Dudevant and de Musset frequented, the production design and overall feel of the film is delightful. Binoche and Magimel also deliver solid performances in their roles--though de Musset's character seemed tailor-made for the talents of Vincent Cassel--it's just a shame that this project didn't have anywhere near the necessary amount of energy to make it successful.