Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel
by Bruno Nuytten

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DVD Reviews of Camille Claudel

DVD Review: Beautiful, faithful film...
Summary: 5 Stars

The weather was so nice, I decided to have lunch in the pavillion on the grounds and eventually spent half a day wondering around the various scuptures situated indoors and outside. The 'Thinker' sat contemplating a nearby bush while a little bird landed on his shoulder, and Balzac looked down in triump from his pedestal. But, inside the house, I found a little room dedicated to the work of Camille Claudel, and here I paused the longest. It struck me then that while Rodin dealt with the external, Claudel dealt with the internal--the soul. I'm a small fan of sculpture, but the marble pieces Claudel worked with her hands are amazing. "Life-like" does not say enough. One piece, a marble bust of a child's head and shoulders took my breath away. I kept waiting for the child to breathe. I checked to see if she was breathing. The only pieces I have seen that are comparable were executed by Micheangelo.

The film CAMILLE CLAUDEL is worthy of the heroine and her sad story. Rodin treated her badly, if for no other reason than he had no right to become sexually involved with her when she was his employee and he was a married man. Today he would be locked up for sexual harrassment, and Claudel would not spend most of her life locked up because she became "hysterical" after he dumped her.

But, Rodin's greatest sin may have been that he became involved with Claudel because he recognized her genius and he wanted to exploit it. Although Rodin certainly had some interesting ideas, which he managed to execute in a prolific way (the Rodin house shows a continuous and ridiculous film of Rodin "creating" a sculpture), I don't think he was terribly innovative. In fact, if the "Thinker" had not been made into book ends, most people would probably not know who Rodin was.

Isabel Adjani plays Claudel. She is perfectly cast as Camille, and her performance is as stunning as it was in Queen Margo. Adjani is one of France's best living actresses--in fact, I think she is the best. Gerhard Depardieu plays Rodin, and he well cast as the large, beefy, inarticulate, egocentric artist. In fact, he looks exactly like the man in the little film I saw in Paris, just as Adjani looks like the Claudel from her portraits.

The film was shot in Paris, and much of the footage taken at the Rodin museum, a Chateau constructed by a 18th Century Aristocrat who died at the hands of Madame Guilliotine. Buy the film and then visit the Rodin museum in Paris to see Claudel's work.

Description of Camille Claudel

And so Auguste Rodin and friends neatly sum up the sad trajectory of Camille Claudel's career.

We first meet the sculptor as she digs clay with bare fingers from a frozen ditch, in the winter of 1885. By the time the film leaves her, in 1913, she's an acclaimed, if socially scorned, artist who's been committed to an asylum.

In the interim, Claudel (Isabelle Adjani) falls in love with the famous, older, womanizing Rodin (Gérard Depardieu). Claudel abandons her work to assist the creatively bankrupt Rodin, filling in as his muse, assistant, and lover. When pregnancy forces Claudel to ask him to choose between her and his longtime mistress, he won't, she leaves, and their alliance ends. This proves to be the turning point for Claudel's mental health; when her affair with Rodin ends, she begins her intimacy with insanity.

As her madness blooms, so do her long-neglected sculptures, which seem to come to life in her hands and arms. Not only a potent love story, Camille Claudel is also an account of art and its wellsprings, and this is where it excels, especially when we witness Claudel's manic genius at work, driven by the necessity to externalize her emotions in the forms of her sculptures.

In the end, the viewer wonders about the causes of Claudel's madness: was it genes, or her reaction against society's mores, or the product of Rodin's persecution? Or, as one exasperated family member terms it, was it "the madness of mud"? --Stefanie Durbin