The clue, of course, is in the suffix appended to the name: this is, in fact, virtually a blow-by-blow of three days extracted from the 30 years, the last 30 years of her life, that Camille Claudel spent incarcerated in an asylum. Made with a touching concern for the electricity and costume bills of the producers the film defines 'austere' and even when the camera ventures outside the vast asylum building it records only lacklustre greens and browns. It could be the work of Carl Dryer, Ingemar Bergman, Robert Bresson, or even, from a later period, Eric let's-watch-some-more-paint-dry Rohmer. What it is, above all, is a Master Class in screen acting by Juliette Binoche who, for ninety per cent of the movie, has no acting competition inasmuch as, in yet another study in economy, the producers surround her with real mentally ill patients, which, of course, she towers above in the way Lemuel Gulliver towered above the Lilliputians who tied HIM down, with the only (presumably) members of Equity being the nuns who run the place, a doctor who appears as bewildered as the inmates and, in less than one reel, the brother of Camille, Paul Claudel, who, in a well-judged microcosm, proves himself as evil as both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in his total annihilation of a single individual.
As you can gather it's not exactly a barrel of laffs but for students of great acting it is richly rewarding and, in its own way, as fine a movie as the previous telling of the Claudel story, featuring Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu which could, of course, by virtue of its coverage of her early life, be retitled Camille Claudel: Part One.
As you can gather it's not exactly a barrel of laffs but for students of great acting it is richly rewarding and, in its own way, as fine a movie as the previous telling of the Claudel story, featuring Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu which could, of course, by virtue of its coverage of her early life, be retitled Camille Claudel: Part One.