Rodin

The overview of the movie doesn't really match the plot. The overview indicates that it's a romance movie but in fact, not too much romance can be seen. Instead, it has a lot of Rodin's career up-and-down moments. It spends too much time on art, which is very irrelevant to the title "Rodin". In addition, too much about "art" overwhelms what the movie was supposed to focus on: Rodin and Camila. Also not too much about Rodin's family. 2 hours of watching, was not very pleasant. The director needed to find a right way to film the scenes: Rodin's personal life, his art work, his relationship, his friendship and etc. All things must be covered, not just mainly focusing on the anesthetic beauty of sculpturing, it was just so lame.

With Rodin, Jacques Doillon gives us a very strange movie. While the actors are great, the light is OK and the cinematography is flawless, what ruin the film is the story and how it is told.

Rather than going through the events of the life of the sculptor, Rodin is only showing glimpses of it like Quotes, moments of works or moments of love. The problem with it is, though the chronological order is preserved, that the spectator is completely lost with untold names or missing events and you always need to think about what happened before in the movie to finally understand what took place an hour ago, which is completely annihilating the empathy for the characters because you can't feel the same as them because you have no idea what just happened.

In addition to that, the scenario have no real purpose, the movie is starting nowhere, and is ending nowhere. Moreover, there are totally useless nude scenes, which is sometimes embarrassing because its going nowhere and is never justified. I'm OK with that, but there must be at least 20 minutes of these, and because the movie is often boring and overall too long, it's annoying.

The film "Rodin" was able to convey a multilayered picture of the life as it is; not always beautiful and smooth, but fragmented and rough. The closer the viewer got to the main characters the moe it was possible to feel their personal agonies. For me, the movie followed very closely the way Rodin presented his sculptures in all their fleshiness. Acting was mainly superb, but for me Lindon underplayed his role. Cinematography was absolutely beautiful and the music fit the overall ambience. I would have liked to have seen a bit more focus on Camille Claudel, portrayed bu Higelin, but of course she deserves her own movie. The ending was absolutely excellent.

"Rodin" presents moments in the sculptor's life as he struggles to complete his statue of Balzac, which was panned at the time but is now considered by some to represent the dawn of modern sculpture. Rodin's role in changing the art of sculpture is reflected by the impressionists with whom he socialises, including Cezanne and Monet, who were likewise challenging the conventions of painting. In the background, literally and figuratively, is the famous "Gates of Hell" sculptural group that the master is slowly assembling. In the foreground is his tempestuous relationship with student Camille Claudel, one of the many students/models he beds over the course of the film. Like his "Balzac" the film was panned on release (but likely not to be considered a game-changing masterpiece in the future) and although I seemed to have liked it more than most critics, it is undeniably slow-moving and disjointed. Unlike films such as "Lust for "Life" (1956), it does not follow the artist from beginning to end, so anyone without some knowledge of the sculptor will find themselves dropped into the story midpoint with insufficient 'exposition' to immerse themselves in the characters or situations. While a known womaniser, the emphasis on Rodin's flings with his frequently nude (and sometimes not very convincing) models gets in the way of what is interesting: the sculpting. On the plus side, the film is beautifully photographed and I thought that Vincent Lindon (Rodin) and Izïa Higelin (Camille) were very good (an opinion not shared by all).

It is a film who I like . For cinematography, for Victor Lindon, for good intentions, for fragmented story, for the noble effort to give portrait not of a life or period but of the spirit of a fight. It is not Camille Claudel but a version, at first sigh rude and not easy to accept , of the self definition of Auguste Rodin. A story of love but not only. A sort of testimony in obvious manner. So, I like it.