Rated: PG
Directed by: Bruno Nuytten
Produced by: Isabelle Adjani, Bernard Artigues
Starring: Isabelle Adjani, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Cuny, Laurent Grévill, Madeleine Robinson.
Restored version
In French with English subtitles
It is definitely worth a trip to Winsor for a coffee, a croissant and Camille Claudel.
As a part of their Isabelle Adjani retrospective, the 2019 Alliance Française Classic Film Festival is screening the 1988 classic, which tells the story of Camille Claudel’s tragic romance with the sculptor Auguste Rodin (Gérard Depardieu).
As the film opens, Camille Claudel is out late at night and all alone. The wind howls, snow is falling, and, despite her full-length skirt and bonnet, Claudel is burrowing into a muddy pit, pawing handfuls of wet clay into a suitcase.
What could possibly inspire such single-minded determination? An audition to work as an assistant to Rodin. Yes. Absolutely. But beyond that, Claudel’s aspirations were so improbable that a film about her life had to be based on a true story. Even at the dawn of modernism, Claudel’s chosen art form was unlikely.
Sculpture has always been hideously expensive and working at scale meant long hours of backbreaking toil in freezing barns and stables. Much to her mother’s (Madeleine Robinson) displeasure, Monsieur Claudel (Alain Cuny) shared his daughter’s ambition and was happy to indulge her. Although, in the end, her father’s indulgence may have turned out to be a poison chalice.
Taken on as one assistant among many, Claudel is working high on a scaffold when her attention is drawn toward a nook on the other side of the studio. From her unseen vantage point she can see Rodin running his lips over his model’s naked flesh. His reputation as a seducer of young women would appear to be well-deserved, until the sculptor later uses the same gesture on a marble torso as he tries to feel the life within.
While kissing the sculptures is generally discouraged in galleries and museums, hewing form from rock is intense and physical, and the film beautifully alludes to the sculptor’s desire to caress the rock, to sensuously experience that moment when the curve of ankle or the bow of a lip first emerges from its casing.
In the role of Claudel’s mentor, Rodin offers keen insights into the nature of sculpture and subtly evokes its poetry, ‘The accident of what is left is a complete emotion,’ but Rodin was years behind in fulfilling his commissions and struggling for inspiration when the affair began. As his muse, his model, his lover and his artistic collaborator, Claudel was the focus of Rodin’s admiration and her name was becoming established at the epicentre of Parisian art, so it must have seemed inconceivable that it would all come apart.
When the unthinkable did happen, Claudel denounced Rodin as the arch-villain who destroyed her. She blamed him for everything from stealing her commissions to undermining her reputation and blighting her exhibitions. She even claimed that Rodin was somehow responsible for the river Seine when her studio flooded.
But there was another less obvious figure involved in Claudel’s downfall. While Claudel was conducting her affairs in the limelight, her younger brother (Laurent Grévill) had been pursuing a successful diplomatic career and quietly gaining recognition as a poet. Ever available and obliging, Paul Claudel was Camille’s closest ally; that is, until he came into his inheritance.
A singular woman in a world conducted by men with agendas, the story of Camille Claudel might not be quite as it appears.