Camille Claudel 1915 (15.)
Directed by Bruno Dumont.
Starring Juliet Binoche, Jean-Luc Vincent, Marion Keller and Robert Leroy. 93 mins
The cinema of Bruno Dumont (Flandres, Humanitie, and Hors Satan) is largely a cinema of denial: no music, no professional actors, no fun. Not much narrative either: even in a biopic he dispenses with the life story in an opening scrawl so he can focus himself on the task of filming drab, daily routine. The sculptor Camille Claudel, a student and former lover of Rodin, was institutionalized in an asylum by her family after she had lived alone in her studio for ten years and destroyed much of her work. Dumont’s film restricts itself to three days in the asylum, as she waits for a visit from her brother, the poet Paul Claudel.
The film is an abrupt change for Dumont in one aspect: after preferring non-professional performers in his films, this time he has given the title role to an actress, and not just any actress but that most devout of thespians, Juliette Binoche. As her fellow inmates though he has cast patients from an institution for the mentally challenged. Even if you weren’t familiar with Dumont’s method any viewer is going to realize that these aren’t actors – any actor playing a person with a disability will make damn sure that the viewer knows the amount of work they are putting in.
The film doesn’t give Binoche much to do other than looks pale and pained against the Avignon scenery and occasionally wail about how hard done by she is. The first hour is a fairly straightforward study of artistic martyrdom, but the film does acquire a new level on the hour with the arrival of her brother Paul, played with film-invigorating fervour by Jean-Luc Vincent, an academic in only his second film role.
Dumont has declared himself an atheist, but he’s the kind that likes to flirt with religious themes without ever committing himself. There is a Calvinist frugality to his cinema: he lays out the stark brutality of existence in the hope, it seems to me, that viewers will find the wonders and the miracles in it for him. The film strongly suggest that her brother left her to rot in this vile institution because it served his own religious beliefs. Dumont’s film condemns her to artistic martyrdom, without even the salvation of an afterlife.
Directed by Bruno Dumont.
Starring Juliet Binoche, Jean-Luc Vincent, Marion Keller and Robert Leroy. 93 mins
The cinema of Bruno Dumont (Flandres, Humanitie, and Hors Satan) is largely a cinema of denial: no music, no professional actors, no fun. Not much narrative either: even in a biopic he dispenses with the life story in an opening scrawl so he can focus himself on the task of filming drab, daily routine. The sculptor Camille Claudel, a student and former lover of Rodin, was institutionalized in an asylum by her family after she had lived alone in her studio for ten years and destroyed much of her work. Dumont’s film restricts itself to three days in the asylum, as she waits for a visit from her brother, the poet Paul Claudel.
The film is an abrupt change for Dumont in one aspect: after preferring non-professional performers in his films, this time he has given the title role to an actress, and not just any actress but that most devout of thespians, Juliette Binoche. As her fellow inmates though he has cast patients from an institution for the mentally challenged. Even if you weren’t familiar with Dumont’s method any viewer is going to realize that these aren’t actors – any actor playing a person with a disability will make damn sure that the viewer knows the amount of work they are putting in.
The film doesn’t give Binoche much to do other than looks pale and pained against the Avignon scenery and occasionally wail about how hard done by she is. The first hour is a fairly straightforward study of artistic martyrdom, but the film does acquire a new level on the hour with the arrival of her brother Paul, played with film-invigorating fervour by Jean-Luc Vincent, an academic in only his second film role.
Dumont has declared himself an atheist, but he’s the kind that likes to flirt with religious themes without ever committing himself. There is a Calvinist frugality to his cinema: he lays out the stark brutality of existence in the hope, it seems to me, that viewers will find the wonders and the miracles in it for him. The film strongly suggest that her brother left her to rot in this vile institution because it served his own religious beliefs. Dumont’s film condemns her to artistic martyrdom, without even the salvation of an afterlife.
