Amazon's product description reads: Language: English, French - which is false and misleading because there is no French to be found anywhere on this DVD.
Listening to the masterful delivery of Gerard Depardieu (one of the finest voices in in current cinema) being smothered by voiceovers less expert than a low budget kung-fu film was painful to experience. Amazon would be doing future misguided purchasers of this DVD a favor if they removed this dubbed version from the site.
However, if you're having trouble with the badly dubbed english your other option, the only one, is to enable the english subtitles and turn the sound off altogehter. What genius was up all night thinking of that one?
The distributors must have anticipated the limits of viewers' endurance but did not have the budget or energy left to give us the option of the original french audio version. Obviously it's stressful packaging foreign productions like this for american audiences and we trust the inclusion of subtitles didn't cause too much lack of sleep.
The main lesson learned is read reviews when purchasing foreign films. It is not beyond a distributors capacity to ruin fine productions such as this one.
If there must be dubbing for brilliant foreign actors I propose a new rule: only brilliant English actors can be used. I guarantee you Balzac did not sound like a bad actor flubbing a soap-opera audition.