The life of Camille Claudel, the French sculptress, has inspired a musical, an opera, a ballet and a 1988 bodice ripper starring Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu.
Camille Claudel 1915 picks up where these other projects bow out. Camille's affair with Auguste Rodin, her one-time mentor, has ended long ago and she now languishes in a rural asylum. Her doctor thinks she should return home, but his request is ignored by Camille's family, as represented by Paul Claudel, the right-wing poet and diplomat. Whatever hysteria and paranoia (if any) brought Camille to her current confinement has mellowed into grief: "I cannot resist the sorrow that overwhelms me," she pleads.
Director Bruno Dumont's 1997 debut feature (La Vie de Jésus) marked him out as one of the more distinctive talents to emerge from the voguish new Cinéma du Corps crew. The deviant sexual behaviour and detached protagonists that characterised his subsequent features, Twentynine Palms (2003) and Flanders (2006), confirmed his importance within the New French Extremism. There is, however, more to Dumont than mere shock value, as the film-maker's recent excursions into weird religiosity and absurdity (see 2009's Hadewijch and 2011's Hors Satan) demonstrate so disconcertingly well.
Dumont's austere visual poetry could seldom be described as entertaining, but it's pure and manacled enough to make Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc look like The Wizard of Oz.
In this spirit, Camille Claudel 1915 demands that Juliette Binoche deliver the most restrained and arguably greatest performance of her career. Her Camille is isolated by misfortune, froideur and intellect. "I cannot stand the cries of these creatures," she says of her impaired fellow inmates, who, in keeping with the film's harsh aesthetic, are essayed by real-life asylum residents.
There are interesting academic essays to be written about the constraints of the camera work, the director’s eerie use of wind, and his dialogue with piety of all kinds in this striking, upsetting depiction of denial and incarceration.
