Dorathen Better Late Then Never

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

dromasca The year is 2017, Camille Claudel is back in town and she seems to go through a revival and reevaluation of her work and short artistic career. A museum dedicated to her life and art opened in March in the small French town of Nogent-sur-Seine, and the museum includes many of the works that survived the agitated 20th century and the destruction by the artist's own hands. Books are being written about her, and art history starts to take her seriously into account. Before this however, there were the films, and especially this one Camille Claudel from 1988. It is not exaggerated to say, I believe, that the film prepared her comeback to the world of arts.Camille Claudel deals more with the character of Camille Claudel, her love story with Auguste Rodin, her relationship with her brother Paul, one of the important French poets of the first half of the 20th century than with her art. Actually one of the few critical observations one may have about the visual part of the film is that there is so little art in it, and from the film we cannot make to ourselves an idea about how good she was. We see an artist fighting with her material, we see a woman fighting prejudice in a world and at a time when women were far from being recognized as equal professionally to men, even less in arts. We see the young woman and artist falling under the fascination of her master and being torn between love and admiration for him, and the need to express herself, to be herself. We see her falling down the spiral of vanity and then madness, and it's up to us to judge whether the roots of her fall are in the social environment, in the attitude of her lover who may be a great artist but is also a womanizer and small human being in terms of relations, or in her own vanity and narcissism. Add to this the ambiguity of the relationship to her brother, and we can now understand the willingly or not, the focus of the script and director Bruno Nuytten was on her personal path rather than on her art.For Bruno Nuytten this was the first film as director, but he already had in 1988 a long career as cinematographer, including a few superb films by Claude Berri. Not everything works or better said, not everything stood the almost 30 years since the film was made. Isabelle Adjani is superb, beautiful and ambitious, a fighter but fragile at the same time, turn between love and vanity. This is one of her best roles. Gérard Depardieu is very fit to Rodin's role, at that time his physical qualities were also perfect and added to his huge talent. The cinematography of the film (signed by Pierre Lhomme ) is excellent, and there are many scenes to remember - in the studio where Rodin and Claudel are shown fighting with the material from which they extracted their works, and out in the nature with clear allusions to the period of the Impressionists when this film is set. On the other hand the soundtrack is horrible. The use of violin music which would have been exaggerated even for a melodrama made in 1938, it's simply a disaster for this film about art and artists made in 1988. Add to this the poor quality of the sound (at least in the copy screened by ARTE TV) which makes half of the dialog incomprehensible even when it is not covered by violins. Maybe digital sound re-working will sometimes in the future save this film. It is highly deserved.

MartinHafer This is a very serious drama about the life of a sculptress who eventually went mad. I think it's rather interesting that Isabelle Adjani was chosen for the role, as a decade earlier she played the obsessed daughter of Victor Hugo (who also was eventually institutionalized). BOTH characters were based on real women, both lived around the same time period, both were French, both suffered the same fate and both completely lost contact with reality and their personalities disintegrated in the end.In the case of this movie, Camille suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia (with signs of Disorganized Schizophrenia as well), as her problems in life all are the "result of August Rodin and people that work for him to help him destroy her career". While it is obvious from the movie that Rodin was a slug and mistreated her because he was a narcissistic, beyond sleeping with her and casting her aside, there was no plot by him to ruin her career. But, unfortunately Camille created an involved delusion that this was so--blaming her failures on him and not the fact that she was erratic and acted "crazy" (living in filth, having the entire first floor of her home flooded and doing nothing about it, etc.). I liked how Adjani handled this but I was especially impressed by the makeup people who made her look very haggard and old--she looked the part.This is NOT a "feel good movie" by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is well-made and compelling and well worth seeing and a good study of mental illness.NOTE TO PARENTS--the film has quite a bit of nudity. While it is NOT gratuitous at all (after all, sculpting often requires nude models), this film would probably be best seen by adults.

w-koenigsmann This is an excellent film and I highly recommend it. The imagery and soundtrack is lush, and the story focuses intensely on Camille's perfectionism and fortitude, all the while depicting her descent into madness, although some claim she wasn't mad, merely a woman ahead of her time, and thus ostracized.From what I have read of various biographies of Camille Claudel, I understand that she was a woman ahead of her time; she scorned the bourgeois, just as many artists, writer, and musicians did -- in the same way that modern artists scorn the common, small-minded, and narrow society (read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf for a good understanding of the artist's situation in society).Following the pattern of Vincent van Gogh and Franz Schubert, Camille Claudel was not a great "promoter" of her works, and, to make things worse, the bourgeois society, just like today, failed to understand her art (again, like the plight of Vincent van Gogh and many others).At her core, Camille Claudel was a true rebel, not because she wanted to be, but because she had to. Camille Claudel was a true artist, in the very deepest sense.

George Parker "Camille Claudel" is an earnest biopic which tells of her rise to prominence in Paris as a student (and mistress) of renown sculptor Auguste Rodin, their love/hate relationship, her struggle for independent recognition as an artist, and her eventual descent into madness. A subtitled French film, "Camille Claudel" deserves high marks on all counts with sterling performances by all and all the trappings of late 19th century life in Paris. If the film has a flaw, it is the almost 2.5 hours is spends on the historically obscure, esoteric, and decidedly unpleasant subject which is likely to wear on, if not wear out, the casual filmgoer interested in entertainment. Not for the many, "Camille Claudel" will play best for patrons or students of French art, art history, sculpting, etc.; for those with an interest in Rodin and/or Claudel; and, of course, fans of the principals. (B)