Camille Claudel, 1915, Bruno Dumont's last foray into straight dramaturgy, delivers in full force all of the Bressonian attributes that Dumont has always been told he's the sole heir to. Each set piece is precise, every composition measured and balanced with the care someone like Claudel or her once-lover and teacher Auguste Rodin would take in making a sculpture. The trees in front of the asylum in which Claudel is doomed to inhabit bend and twist like one of Claudel's own sculptures; from the outset Camille is encased by everything she has lost. Dumont's austerity and plodding pace is taxing (in a positive sense) as it draws upon every pain, every scream (which Camille denounces in a letter to her brother), every moment of existential angst inside of Claudel. I read somebody say something along the lines of: if you want to watch Juliette Binoche cry naked for two hours, than this is the movie for you. No, Binoche--god this sounds pretentious and hyperbolic--is Claudel. Binoche has been as good, but never better. But it is Binoche, what else could be expected. The interiors look decorated by the impressionists artists in which Claudel was a part of and even the façade of the institution in which Claudel has been relegated to that looms hauntingly over the remnants of a garden looks very much like Rodin's The Gates of Hell. This is not a "hysterical woman" film, it is only a biopic in the most technical terms, what Camille Claudel is, is an unflinching look at a great artist, an obviously tortured woman who has been betrayed and consumed by her peers, her family and her culture. Continually clear-eyed begging the question of how and if there is any existential reconciliation to be had when you are trapped and representation and reality become blurred.
Review of Camille Claudel 1915
