![]() ![]() ![]() By the end, you are left with a feeling of helplessness, rage, and a kind of abstracted bafflement. It's a harrowing film, made even more so by the raw performance of Juliette Binoche as Camille Claudel. The result is a story pared down to a bone-white gleam, a grim portrait of monotony and silence broken by unrelieved despair, and an almost suffocating sense of claustrophobia and entrapment. Dumont uses only Claudel's medical records and the letters that Claudel and her brother wrote to one another, as the material for his script. Claudel was committed to an asylum in 1913 by her brother, poet/diplomat Paul Claudel, following the death of their father (a man who had always been in her corner). It tells the story of three days in the life of Camille Claudel, gifted sculptor and one-time protege and lover of Auguste Rodin. "Camille Claudel 1915", the latest by French director Bruno Dumont, is that kind of cinema. ![]() When done well, its immediacy, its sense of experiencing another life (fictional or not) can bring about an expansion of understanding, an overwhelming telescoping of consciousness. "Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering…I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures."-Camille Claudel in a letter to her brother PaulĬinema can be one of the most empathetic of arts. ![]()
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