- Video production of the Pulitzer-prize winning musical stage production. In the first act, "George", a fictionalized Georges Seurat paints his lover, Dot, and "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte." Characters who become figures and vice versa walk through the story. In Act 2, George's descendant, a sculptor, comes to terms with his grandmother, Life, and Art.—Kathy Li
- In a series of Sundays between 1884 and 1886, George, a struggling artist, and Dot, his mistress, attempt to keep their relationship together as their differing wants and life styles tear them apart. Then, a full century later, George's great-great-grandson (also named George) attempts to find his artistic voice.
- Does the artist matter? Can you just look at a painting or do you need to know the person who painted it? Is part of art inventing stories about the subjects we see in paintings? This filmed stage play follows a brief period in the life of Georges Seurat as he spends two years ignoring real people in order to paint his pointillistic masterpiece. Dot, his model, tries to get his attention but he choses Art over Life, or as Marie says: Art over children. The second act jumps into the present (1986), to show his daughter and her grandson, who is perhaps more of an impresario than an impressionist, as they attend an opening for the famous painting, which was not at all famous in Georges's day. Seurat's paintings are criticized by some characters as plotless or unrealistic, but are shown in the film as brilliant in technique and color, and so this Sondheim musical invents a plot and a reality for the painting. The film is part documentary (with good shots of the actual painting), containing lots of information about Seurat. The plot, in the end, tests our own dedication to the creative process and to art, with dramatic results. The attention to technique, at every level, is a subplot.
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