Title: Camille Claudel
Release Date: December 7, 1988
Director: Bruno Nuytten
Production Company: Gaumont
Summary/Review:
This French biopic tells the story of Camille Claudel, an innovative sculptor active from the 1880s to early 1900s. In her lifetime, her art was overshadowed by her romance with Auguste Rodin. The film stars the stunning Isabelle Adjani as Claudel, a young woman with a passion for art that infuriates her mother. Yet, her father dotes on her, and her brother Paul (Laurent Grévill), who would gain fame as a poet and diplomat, also offers her support.
Gérard Depardieu, at the peak of imperial period as France’s most celebrated actor, plays Rodin. Appropriately, Depardieu plays Rodin as the celebrity, overseeing large-scale commissions like “The Gates of Hell” with teams of apprentices working in factory-like settings. It’s implied that Rodin has a creative block that prevents him from making his own work and finds inspiration in Claudel. Although their romance is depicted as a consensual romance, the film strongly indicates that women artists were expected to make themselves available for sex if they wished to get ahead.
Eventually, Claudel sours on Rodin, because she feels she’s not getting enough credit for her contributions, and because he refuses to break off his long-time relationship with Rose Beuret for a a monogamous relationship with her. Claudel attempts to make her own way as an artist, but struggles against discrimination against women and abandonment by patrons and family. Eventually she ends up living in a derelict workshop inhabited by multiple cats, paranoid that Rodin is orchestrating her demise. The film concludes as she’s determined to be mentally ill and Paul has her committed to a psychiatric hospital where she will live out her life.
I don’t know enough about Camille Claudel’s life to judge the historical accuracy of this movie, but I sense that it is a melodramatic interpretation of a more complex story. Nevertheless, the acting of Adjani and Depardieu and others makes it an excellent character study.
Rating: ****
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