CAMILLE CLAUDEL Movie Review

In the late 19th century, the gifted sculptress Camille Claudel (Isabelle Adjani), desperate for artistic success and obsessively involved with the womanizing sculptor Auguste Rodin (Gérard Depardieu), descends further and further into emotional instability, ultimately ending her life in an asylum. Though it's ostensibly the brutally insensitive treatment she receives at the hands of her egomaniacal lover Rodin that causes Camille's mental breakdown, she's depicted as wacko from the movie's opening frames. On her hands and knees in a pit of mud, digging for the best clay for sculpting, we understand that Camille's frantic flailing and her huffing and puffing is supposed to symbolize the essence of a dedicated, possessed artist searching for the truth in the dirt—but Adjani's bug-eyed, operatic frenzy torpedoes any possibility of multiple meanings. She just looks nuts. With the lead character opening the film at this kind of fever pitch, there's no way for the first-time director, cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, to modulate her escalating madness. We spend much of the film's two-and-a-half hours (cut down from nearly three) watching her slapping and pounding mud, as if the intensity of her blows were indicative of the power of the genius within (the Academy must have believed it—she got an Oscar nomination for Best Actress). Depardieu provides a bit of a respite, though it's embarrassing to identify with him when you know he'd like to see the lead character carted off. Adjani may have felt that this project—and the character she plays—had much in common with her Adele Hugo in Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. But where that film took the viewer every step of the way along a remarkable internal journey, Camille Claudel is as stiff as one of the real Camille's sculptures—and far less expressive.

NEXT STOP … Isadora (The Loves of Isadora), Savage Messiah, Edvard Munch, Artemisia

1989 (R) 149m/C FR Isabelle Adjani, Gerard Depardieu, Laurent Grevill, Alain Cuny, Madeleine Robinson, Katrine Boorman; D: Bruno Nuytten; W: Bruno Nuytten, Marilyn Goldin; C: Pierre Lhomme; M: Gabriel Yared. Cesar Awards '89: Best Actress (Adjani), Best Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film; Nominations: Academy Awards '89: Best Actress (Adjani), Best Foreign-Language Film. VHS, LV ORI, IME