Camille Claudel 1915

Camille Claudel (Juliette Binoche) was born in 1864. She was a sculptress and also Rodin's mistress for 15 years. She became a recluse after breaking up with him. With the death of her father in 1913, her family confines her to Montdevergues Asylum near Avignon in 1915. She is paranoid about being poisoned, fears persecution from Rodin and thinks her family is greedy for her inheritance.

There is a lot of waiting for something to happen. It's funny that Camille claims that they're trying to bore her to death. The movie gets that point across very well. Juliette Binoche is amazing. The scene where she lays out all of her persecutions to her doctor is electric. However, it's only one scene and one great actress. It's not more than that.

The only other Bruno Dumont film I've seen is the bizarre and shocking Twentynine Palms so knowing Camille Claudel 1915 is about an insane asylum, it's difficult to not expect something that will rock me to my core. However, Camille is surprisingly restrained. While this feels like a mature approach at times, it can too often feel like it's too weak on its themes of religion, sanity and art when there's such potential. A little more focus and clarity could've saved what would be a great film. What ends up making the film is Juliette Binoche's committed performance that provides a unique perspective into a personal hell. She certainly deserves to be called one of the best actresses of all-time and this just confirms it further. It's beautifully shot and constructed, but then this leads to it feeling too measured and thus too forced when it could've been much better if it was allowed to breathe naturally. It's a very interesting film, but I can't help that it needn't been as empty as it was.

7/10

Nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin, Camille Claudel, 1915, the latest film by French auteur Bruno Dumont, is arguably his best realized and most accessible work since La Vie de Jesus and L'humanité in the late 1990s. Juliet Binoche delivers a masterful performance as sculptor and graphic artist Camille Claudel, mistress of Auguste Rodin, who was confined to an asylum at Montdevergues near Avignon in 1914 after an emotional collapse. Derived from Camille's medical records and private letters to her brother, poet and staunch Catholic Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), the film takes place over a period of three days in the asylum where we experience the oppressive nature of Camille's routines, lightened only by the inmates attempt at performing the play Don Juan.

Although Dumont uses mentally-disabled patients and their nurses as actors, there is no hint of exploitation and they are only used to draw a sharp contrast between Camille and the seriously ill. Considered to be a great but unrecognized feminist artist (usually only discussed in relation to Rodin), Camille is filled with despair and depression at her confinement but looks forward with anticipation to the impending visit from Paul. Though much of the film has a strong impact, the sequences in which Camille pleads with her doctor (Robert Leroy) and with Paul for her release reach the heights of Dumont's consummate artistry.

In spite of the fact, however, that the head doctor feels she could be re-integrated into society, her mother and self-absorbed brother ignore her pleas and refuse to relinquish their tight control. Though Camille's paranoia is evident in these scenes (she insists on preparing her own food for fear of being poisoned), the power of Ms. Binoche's performance allows Camille's intelligence and true stature as an artist to shine through. Austere and unforgiving in the mold of Alain Cavalier's Therese, Camille Claudel, 1915 can be compared to the films of Robert Bresson in its long silences, spiritual depth, and uncompromising integrity. Viewing can be a harrowing and uncomfortable experience, but the same can also be said about many great works of art.

"There is something sadder to lose than life – the reason for living." Paul Claudel, poet, playwright, diplomat and younger brother of Camille.

Camille Claudel 1915 is not The King of Hearts, a lyrical 1966 drama about a WWII French asylum in a town about to be invaded by Nazis. Claudel is decidedly not lyrical except for its exceptionally artistic cinematography dominated by trees that look like sculptures and buildings ancient with secrets.

It's a somber but fascinating three-day narrative about artist Camille Claudel's confinement in a madhouse while she is awaiting her famous mystic-poet brother, Paul, to visit her.

Previous to 1915, Camille had been the student and lover of Auguste Rodin, the most famous French sculptor of his time and one of the greatest in the history of civilization. Her incarceration was due to her paranoia in general about his alleged plot to poison her and her schizophrenia, both reflected after breaking up with Rodin in her smashing her sculptures in her own studio.

This film deals little with Rodin but much with her brother, who refused her entreaties, and those of the mental hospital staff, to release her. His chilling visitation to her is redolent of his reliance on a mystical relation with God and certainty that she not be released to go home. The introductory quote suggests he may not have adhered to his own philosophy by ignoring the signs that she was sane and the reality of denying her a reason to live.

This stark film concentrates mostly on her lonely struggle to protect herself from the plot to poison her and her loss of her sculptures and tools. Her artistry is supplanted by boiling potatoes and avoiding crazed fellow inmates. She says in one of her letters, "Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering….I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures." The movie is static but intensely suggestive through the brilliant Binoche's expressions of wisdom and isolation.

It's not hard to sympathize with an artist robbed of her livelihood and family. That she may truly be schizophrenic and paranoid is always possible; however Binoche's humanity tips the scale in favor of Camille's sanity and the world's indifference. As a woman and an artist in the shadow of Rodin, she is doomed to second-class citizenship.

Camille will spend almost three decades without hope: "Sadder than to lose one's possessions is to lose one's hope." Paul Claudel

Bruno Dumont's film is best appreciated if the viewer has viewed Bruno Nuytten's 1988 film "Camille Claudel" which ends with Camille being institutionalized by her brother Paul and her mother. That act can be initially condoned as Camille needed treatment at that time. Dumont's film is based surprisingly on the letters of Paul Claudel.

In Dumont's film too, Paul does not heed the doctor's view that Camille is a docile and almost normal and could be discharged. For those who have seen Nuytten's film, there is sufficient evidence that brother and sister had been very close to each other and Paul had tried to make his sister's work famous. All these critical facts are never stated in Dumont's film. The religious fervour of Camille in Dumont's film is totally absent in Nuytten's film. The long religious soliloquys of Paul, fits in with Dumont's interest in religion. For me, Dumont's attempts at describing Camille in the asylum is merely projecting Paul's attempt at absolving his decision not to help release his sister from the asylum.

Binoche is always good in any film but this performance is not her best--which I am convinced was the one in "Certified Copy."